When you win, you can afford to be gracious, you can afford to have a little more mercy.

What happens to women happens to the entire nation. People work hard. But when you're working long hours, you don't get to spend time with your kids, you don't get a chance to take a vacation every now and then, you don't get a chance to make a big purchase (which helps the economy). There's something wrong with that. This isn't about wages, this about quality of life.

We really are going to have to answer the cries of everyday women and men who are calling out for elected leaders to do something different. They want to be treated fairly and they need a political party who represents them.

Workers should have a right to sit across from management to collectively bargain about their work conditions, their wages, and the future direction of the company. To me, that's just a humane thing to do. It is unacceptable in the 21st century to have companies not want to do that with their employees and create a great work environment.

We've had to overcome a lot in America to become a nation of progress. We still have a lot of progress to be made.

It's important for women to understand that it's bad enough that we don't make dollar-for-dollar what men do, but when you distill that down to women of color, our Latinas and our African American women, it's even less than that 78 cents.

Child care can almost bankrupt a family, even a two-parent household in which both parents are working. That keeps a parent from being at ease and it really stifles the social and economic growth of a family. Women are hit hard across the board, but particularly in homes where the mother is the head of the household and the only wage-earner. It hurts her, and it hurts her children.