The State of Feminism

The term "breaking the bargain" makes me think about a conversation that I just had with my daughter who's a new mom. We were walking with my grandson a couple months ago, and she said to me, "Mom, didn't you ever want to be home with us when we were little?" I said, "Well, you have to understand, I didn't want to let the boys run the world."

When I was pregnant with both my kids, I was a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, and I was very busy trying to pretend I wasn't even pregnant. I was trying cases back to back, I had no other lawyer on the cases with me — that's just how I was doing it. But here we are, some 30 years later since I left the U.S. Attorney's Office, and it's like the boys are still running the world. So of course as we were pushing that baby carriage around, I was having those moments of like, was it worth it?

So I think we need feminism because the boys are still running the world. Yes, there have been all these advances, but I don't think we're on the cusp of enough change. Obviously the deprivation in the United States of the very dominion over our bodies is enormous. And the violence — not only are men running the world, running it into the ground, but the violence in which they run the world. So we need a world that meets human needs, which is ultimately what we care about.

These remarks have been edited for clarity and length.