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Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

Can you not see that women could do and would do a hundred times more for the slave, if she were not fettered?

Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.

I don't for a moment believe that women have suffered the same kind of injustices that blacks have - women have never been enslaved. But still, many of the psychological and economic problems are the same.

So many of us had hoped that the civil system might be an alternative for some women, where the burdens were a little bit less, and cases might be easier to prove.

When I started giving talks about women's history, one of the things that bothered me was the tendency to say, 'Well, everybody was totally oppressed and suddenly in 1964 we rose up, got our freedom, and here we are.' It dismisses the women who fought for rights for several hundred years of our history up to that point.

This is the fantasy of every woman - to hold at our feet servile and tame slaves, like in Roman times. And the worse we treat them, the more passionate they become.

Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.

Women were freed from positive duties when they could not perform them, but not when they could.

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.