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Politics need to stop treating women as a special-interest group.

We are bringing women into politics to change the nature of politics, to change the vision, to change the institutions. Women are not wedded to the policies of the past. We didn't craft them. They didn't let us.

Politics is rough and tumble everywhere, and many women recoil from that negative aspect of it - the nastiness, the charges and counter-charges.

Most of the women who have offered themselves for public office over the years have done so, I believe, more because of the 'dirt' than in spite of it.

Women are tough campaigners. They certainly know how to withstand attacks. And I think we make a mistake if we say, as some do, that women should play by different rules, or that they are somehow especially vulnerable to the rules of politics. I don't think that's true.

Whatever is dirty, it is women's job to clean up, or drive some man to clean up, and that goes for everything from cellar to senate.

Politics is a potent way to empower women.

You can hardly judge women's effect on politics merely from the action of individual women officeholders.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

Every congresswoman surely endures the same strains that drive some of her male colleagues to have affairs: lots of travel, families far away, heady work that makes a domestic routine seem distant and boring. But the stakes are much higher for women, because they are still judged by a different standard.