How long before both women and men are allowed to see self-respecting rebellion as a lifelong possibility? - Gloria Steinem

So many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.

As novelist Margaret Atwood wrote to explain women’s absence from quest-for-identity novels, “there’s probably a simple reason for this: send a woman out alone on a rambling nocturnal quest and she’s likely to end up a lot deader a lot sooner than a man would.”3 The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology — which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time — we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.4

I finally understood why laughter is a mark of wanderers, from the holy fools of Old Russia to the roadies of rock music. It’s the surprise, the unexpected, the out of control. It turns out that laughter is the only free emotion — the only one that can’t be compelled. We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality.