The Only Way For A Woman, As

Development Can Indeed Continue Beyond Childhood And Youth, Beyond The Seventies. It Can Continue Until The Very End Of Life, Given Purposes That Challenge And Use Our Human Abilities. . . . In Sum, Our Development Does Not Necessarily End At Any Age. We Can Continue To Develop Into Our Eighties, Even To Our Nineties.

Why The Increasing Emphasis By Professional Age Experts And The Media On - And Public Acceptance Of - The Nursing Home As The Locus Of Age When, In Fact, More Than Ninety Percent Of Those Over Sixty-five Continue To Live In The Community?

What Had Really Caused The Women's Movement Was The Additional Years Of Human Life. At The Turn Of The Century Women's Life Expectancy Was Forty-six; Now It Was Nearly Eighty. Our Groping Sense That We Couldn't Live All Those Years In Terms Of Motherhood Alone Was "the Problem That Had No Name." Realizing That It Was Not Some Freakish Personal Fault But Our Common Problem As Women Had Enabled Us To Take The First Steps To Change Our Lives.

American Housewives Have Not Had Their Brains Shot Away, Nor Are They Schizophrenic In The Clinical Sense. But If ... The Fundamental Human Drive Is Not The Urge For Pleasure Or The Satisfaction Of Biological Needs, But The Need To Grow And To Realize One's Full Potential, Their Comfortable, Empty, Purposeless Days Are Indeed Cause For A Nameless Terror.

I Never Set Out To Write A Book To Change Women's Lives, To Change History. It's Like, 'who, Me?' Yes, Me. I Did It. And I'm Not That Different From Other Women. Maybe My Power And Glory Was That I Could Speak My Truth As A Woman And It Was The Truth Of Every Woman.