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The failure of women to have reached positions of leadership has been due in large part to social and professional discrimination. In the past, few women have tried, and even fewer have succeeded.

Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights.

Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.

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.

There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.

The battle for the individual rights of women is one of long standing and none of us should countenance anything which undermines it.

We cannot ensure that women will be free of discrimination in the workplace and everywhere as long as women are not universally defended under our Constitution. As it stands now, the equal rights of women are subject to interpretation of law. That is a risk our mothers, sisters and daughters cannot afford.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

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.

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.