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I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.

Women are no longer being defined by where they were born or their colour. That's huge.

The women of my generation and my daughter's generation, they were very active in moving along the social change that would result in equal citizenship stature for men and women.

How fortunate I was to be alive and a lawyer when, for the first time in United States history, it became possible to urge, successfully, before legislatures and courts, the equal-citizenship stature of women and men as a fundamental constitutional principle.

We were created to be woman and man and make kids.

Up until 1920, women couldn't vote. Until 1974, married women couldn't get their own credit cards or, in some cases, their own loans. Basically, the husband's professional, social, and economic identity covered the individual identity of the wife.

Women had a rights movement where they fought for changes. Men... don't band together in quite that way. It happens not in such a public-cascade way as in a house-to-house way.

During my lifetime, I realized that discrimination was not accidental, that there were structural roots and causes to it. So if we wanted to change women's lives, we need to deal with those root causes.

The recognition of rights for women and minorities became a large part of my understanding of what this country is all about.

I am interested in people living in the margins of society, and I do have a mission to tell the stories of women of colour in particular. I feel we've been present throughout history, but our voices have been neglected.