Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love.
The young women waking up to feminism now already wake up to more consciousness than my generation had. Even just simple things like equal pay - before you went, in my generation, and asked for a raise, you went through nausea and your palms sweating.
We Americans forget or rewrite even our recent history, and accomplishments of any group not pale and male have tended to get downplayed or erased - one reason why Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda and I founded the Women's Media Center: to make women visible and powerful in media.
Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.
The Roman Catholic church... carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion.
Should we tolerate debate within feminism's ranks? Undebatable! But it's not so simple: women are socialised to avoid conflict; when we do differ, especially on politics and in public, it's still tediously labelled a 'catfight.'
I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.
Feminism is experiential; it's comparing notes. And when those stories get told, and you realize it's not just you - it's bigger - there's just a huge sigh of relief. Otherwise, you think you're crazy.
Women born and raised on this fragile planet have more uniting us than dividing us - and it's the job of feminists to help us realise that.
Feminism is for all women and girls, not a privileged few or one ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference, ability, region or hemisphere.
