Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standard that implies).

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

[Mjen were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought)' from the outside in.

[T]he nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

Romance is a means to the end of selfcompletion, but love is an end in itself.

As wise women and men in every culture tell us: The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

Battered wowien is a phrase that uncovered major, long-hidden violence. It helps us to face the fact that, statistically speaking, the most dangerous place for a woman is in her own home, not in the streets.