Work-family conflicts - the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child - would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.

To me, a person's identity is composed of both an 'I' and a 'we.' The 'I' finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity - a tribe, a community, a 'we.' America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us.

What I often say to people who are quick to say I’m not a feminist is if you think you’re not a feminist, give it all back.

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.

The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.