“I prefer the word ‘homemaker’ because ‘housewife’ always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.”

Congress is a middle-aged, middle-class, white male power structure … no wonder it’s been so totally unresponsive to the needs of this country.

Abortion doesn’t belong in the political arena. It’s a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.

Women will not simply be mainstreamed into the polluted stream. Women are changing the stream, making it clean and green and safe for all – every gender, race, creed, sexual orientation, age, and ability.

In the face of so much pain, I remain an incurable optimist. I am fueled by the passion of the women I have been privileged to meet and work with, buoyed by their hope for peace, justice, and democracy.

We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room.

We need laws that protect everyone – men and women, straights and gays, regardless of sexual perversion…ah, persuasion.

They are a very extensive minority who have suffered discrimination and who have the same right to participation in the promise and fruits of society as every other individual.

Women will change the nature of power, rather than power changing the nature of women.

Nixon impeached himself. He gave us Ford as his revenge.

She (a woman politician) will be challenging a system that is still wedded to militarism and that saves billions of dollars a year by underpaying women and using them as a reserve cheap labor supply

I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee.

There are those who say I’m impatient, impetuous, uppity, rude, profane, brash, and overbearing. Whether I’m any of those things, or all of them, you can decide for yourself. But whatever I am — and this ought to be made very clear — I am a very serious woman.

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.

The inside operation of Congress – the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building – is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.

the women’s movement, not only here in the U.S., but worldwide, is bigger and stronger than ever before and in places where it has never been. It has arms. It has legs. And most importantly, it has heads.