Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and. - Gloria Steinem

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life — a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality — then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

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

To transform inequality in the outside world, we have to start inside the home. We have to get rid of the old idea that what happens to men is political, and therefore subject to change, but what happens to women is cultural, and therefore can’t, or shouldn’t, be changed.