...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.

This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman...is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.

In our age of nuclear and biological weapons and the ever more efficient exploitation of nature, the mix of high technology and an ethos of domination could take us to an evolutionary dead end.

The link between intimate violence in the home and the international violence of terrorism and war is as tightly bound together as the fingers of a clenched fist.

The bad news is that the movement toward the partnership side of the social scale (and it is always a matter of degree, as no society is a pure partnership or domination system) has been fiercely resisted and countered by periodic regressions. So domination systems have rebuilt themselves in different forms - be they secular or religious, eastern or western, leftist or rightist.

For both Adam Smith and Karl Marx the essential work of caring for people, starting in early childhood, was "just women's work" - and in their minds not even classified as "productive work."

Contemporary nations such as Sweden, Norway, and Finland, where women are half of the national legislatures, have more caring policies, less violence, and more environmentally sustainable policies. These are connections we must pay attention to if we are to build a better future for us all.