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The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.

In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.

We, in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, are acting like we have just discovered freedom and liberation. But I'm sure that many women have worked for that for such a long time.

When I started researching history in the 1960s, a lot of women about whom I've subsequently written were actually footnotes to history. There was a perception that women weren't important. And it's true. Women were seen historically as far inferior to men.

I think feminists are unaware of the tremendous extent of the role of women in history.

Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization. I'm just the first one to point it out publicly.

The rights of women are to the 21st century what civil rights were to the 20th.

The battle for women's rights has been largely won.

I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles.

Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights, and governments need to learn from that, listen to the movement and respond.