I write to figure out what I am thinking: What does my life mean?

the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.

The 'feminine' woman is forever static and childlike. She is like the ballerina in an old-fashioned music box, her unchanging features tiny and girlish, her voice tinkly, her body stuck on a pin, rotating in a spiral that will never grow.

When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.

the backlash convinced the public that women's 'liberation' was the true contemporary American scourge - the source of an endless laundry list of personal, social, and economic problems.

As it turns out, social scientists have established only one fact about single women's mental health: employment improves it.

In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.