we need to know where we have been: we need our history. - Adrienne Rich

If it is the present that calls us to activism, it is history that must nourish our choices and commitment.

An early objection to feminism-in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-was that it would make women behave like men-ruthlessly, exploitatively, oppressively. In fact, radical feminism looks to a transformation of human relationships and structures in which power, instead of a thing to be hoarded by a few, would be released to and from within the many, shared in the form of knowledge, expertise, decision making, access to tools, as well as in the basic forms of food and shelter and health care and literacy.

Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths. Perhaps we have to lose our national fantasies.