“How dare you tell me ‘I am not like most girls’, when those ‘girls’ you refer to are my sisters and mothers, my friends, the very solace and the kindness I have sought when the worst things in my life have happened? How dare you assume I should take that as a compliment, and beam at you like it is praise when you are alienating me from the very core of my proudly female being? There are a thousand ways to tell me you love me, and making my sisters small to make me big isn’t one of them. Tell me you love me, but not because I am different. Tell me you love me, just because you do.”

“We have a law, one of the first laws in history that came down to us from 2400-2300 BC, and its says that when a woman speaks out of turn she will be smacked by a brick, and that’s it. That’s where it began. It’s true there has been a conspiracy to silence us. I think that was the most shocking thing because you feel like most women are terrified of public speaking, we feel inauthentic—it still exists. Where does it come from? It came from there. It’s not magic. You can get a handle on these things. These things evolve, and they evolved for a reason.”

“What if, instead of teaching women that they have to raise their hands to speak at meetings, we taught men to be more reflective and circumspect; instead of telling women to tamp down their emotions at the office, a man was told that he didn’t appear committed enough to the job because he’s never shed tears over it; instead of pushing women to take public credit for their work, we publicly admonish men who don’t properly acknowledge others’ contributions? I was just invited to a seminar on public speaking skills for women — where’s the class on listening skills for men?”

“Some people ask, ‘Why the word feminist? Why not say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?’ Because that would be dishonest… to choose the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. it would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not abut being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem should acknowledge that.”