The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and… - Gloria Steinem

To write is to bring an inner voice into the outer world, to believe that our thoughts are worth entering the thinking of others, and to make real what has never existed in quite the same way before. What could be a better path to self-value than that?

I think feminists and progressive Democrats err when they accusingly say to Republican women, “How can you be a Republican?” Nobody responds to that. But if you say, “Look, you didn’t leave your party. The party left you. Let’s just look at the issues and see what they are and forget about party labels and vote for ourselves,” I think people would really respond.

We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself — or will use military violence against another country — is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.