The truth is plain. White Southerners owned black slaves, who constituted property with no legal rights whatever. Their protection, such as it was, lay in their market value as workers, but a slave-owner who enjoyed indulging his power over the weak more than he relished the increased production of his fields - even if he were a man with a sadistic bent - rarely suffered legal penalties.

      Slave women were valuable as breeders and were commonly so advertised. Here a white man's economic interests were by no means at odds with a psychic need to dominate - quite the contrary - and lust has played a gigantic if insufficiently recorded role in history. In ante-bellum America, rape was defined by law as an act of sexual violence against a white woman, which means that legally a black woman could not be raped - even if she were free! According to historian Adele Logan Alexander, "The only legal impropriety involved if an adult female slave was forced into an unwelcome sexual encounter - by any man, black or white - could be a charge of trespass or injury against the property of her master. . . .

      But if these liaisons were not invariably hideous for the black women caught up in them, one key fact remains: their alternatives to resisting a white man who wanted them sexually were often torture and even death." page 10

      "Many wives took refuge in fantasy, as Mary Chesnut, the wife of one of Jefferson Davis's most trusted aides, noted: "The mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children - and every lady tells you who the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think." page 13

      "In this way, a society grounded in sexual coercion, secrets, and lies became a model to emulate - with a courtly gentleman whose word was law at its very center. To hide the most fundamental violations of trust and decency, silence therefore reigned on subjects like sex, race, and money; literature that addressed such topics was hidden under floorboards, if read at all, and polished conversation was prized in proportion to its vacuousness. " page 14

      2) From the story of a prominent psychotherapist: "When it got to the point where I didn't want to come to work, I decided I'd have to do something. I'd never considered filing a grievance because anybody who filed one was a marked woman, a troublemaker, and you were out as far as future jobs were concerned." page 54

      "These men were predators: they had positions of authority and used the leverage that gave them to prey on women over whom they had power." page 55

      "The standard answer the others were given if they complained or asked for help was: Leave it alone! That's life! You can't do anything about it. And the feeling behind the words was that they were causing the trouble." page 55

      "So long as men have had controlling power over women's lives and the lives of their children, many women have believed they had to stay on their good side. But in doing what they felt they had to do, they've also been crippled; tenderness and sympathy have curdled into sentimentality, as women have made excuses for men who could certainly behave decently if held to higher standards. At best, women's readiness to forgive has undercut their own sense of decency and therefore the ease and confidence with which they negotiate the world. At worst, they've played on men's vanity and weaknesses to manipulate them. And the women who've been willing to play along with men have betrayed the women who haven't.

      I don't want to be misunderstood: I am not blaming the victim. The responsibility lies with the men who abuse their power. But to change this crippling dynamic, women have to stop playing the game." page 56

      3) "More often than not, in fact, putting up with it turns out to have meant squandering precious energies that could never be recovered. For most of these women, the shock has never wholly passed, and the scars have proved lasting. The experience of being treated like an object left Laura permanently incredulous: "Sexual harassment was so alien to me. I didn't not believe it, but I didn't fully believe it, either." Putting up with it meant increasing the chasm of misunderstanding between the sexes, and some of these women grew frankly hostile to men." page 84

      4) "The men were predators, fundamentally indifferent to the feelings or even the personhood of the women they coerced." page 96

      5) "And why do the men who run this world of ours punish the women who object, rather than the men who behave loutishly? Why do they label these women troublemakers instead of telling the guys to row up? Why do men close ranks and make excuses for other men who say and do these things? Why do they attack the Anita Hills and let Clarence Thomases set the agenda? Why do other women sometimes make excuses for the men who say and do these things? Why do we hear ad nauseam the tiresome refrain, "Can't you take a joke?" when nothing going on is funny?" page 152

      "Women transcend their state as victims when they make common cause with other women to make sure that what happened to them won't happen to others." page 153

      "As the Capitol Hill Women's Political Causus indicates in its sexual harassment policy, the "primary characteristic of harassers is the desire to exert power and control and the belief that they can victimize with impunity - that such abuses of power will be condoned." page 154

      6) "Jacqueline Ortiz, a twenty-nine-year-old reservist, told a Senate panel that during the Persian Gulf War, she'd been forcibly sodomized by her sergeant in broad daylight. While two women captured by the Iraqis had been brutally raped, twenty-four, it turned out, reported being assaulted by their own colleagues, many of them officers." page 177

      7) From Pat Foote's (Retired Brigadier General) story: "So I instituted the "crotch-mentality award of the week" that some instructor or student would get, based on how gross their behavior or comments had been. It got to be a hated moment in the week! They didn't want to be labeled." page 181 :-), good idea!

      8) "Most of us grew up with the maxim "A man's home is his castle," and many of us were in for a terrible shock. For nowhere has the presumption that the generic "men" includes women been more profoundly misleading: a man's castle may well be a dungeon for the woman and children who live there, and if the children are female, the danger escalates.

      While domestic violence can be psychological rather than physical, more than 11 percent of women have been literally battered by their mates, and child abuse has burgeoned into an epidemic." page 192

      9) " "There is no guarantee," she [Barbara Ehrenreich] writes, "that a man's emotional dependency on his wife will last as long as her financial dependency on him." " page 193

      10) "As Carolyn Heilbrun puts it in Writing a Woman's Life, "Above all other prohibitions, what has been forbidden to women is anger, together with the open admission of the desire for power and control over one's life." page 216

      11) "But, as John Stuart Mill knew, Lord Acton's celebrated maxim "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely" applies even more forcefully to the power of men over women than it does to the handful of men who hold power in the state." page 219

      12) "In short, the rules men have written to govern the relations between the sexes have given them permission to have their way, no matter what the cost to the women around them. In a culture, then, where lying is considered a sin or at best dishonorable, a contrary ethic has been mandated for women: they've been expected to lie to or on behalf of the men on whom they depend - to call the sun the moon if they say it is the moon. And the penalties for refusing have ranged from the loss of sustenance to disgrace, dishonor, and death." page 224

      "A great deal is at stake here. Men who are prepared to hear only what they want to hear are not very reliable guides, protectors, or even companions, and the women who lie to them to secure their love and/or their patronage end up being at best confused." page 224

      13) Seen on a T-shirt: "United we bargain. Divided we beg." page 232

      14) Paulina Wright Davis in the 1870s on the controversies that dogged Fanny Wright: "Women joined in the hue and cry against her, little thinking that men were building the gallows and making them the executioners. Women have crucified in all ages the redeemers of their sex, and men mock them with the fact. It is time now that we trample beneath our feet this ignoble public sentiment which men have made for us; and if others are to be crucified before we can be redeemed, let men do the cruel, cowardly act; but let us learn to hedge womanhood round with generous, protecting care and love." page 233

      15) "Truth-telling and compassion for slave women, for instance, was a dangerous business in nineteenth-century America, especially for white women, and even in the North. Men did not want to be held to account, and the imperatives to silence were enforced by every shred of power and authority at the disposal of patriarchal society: financial, social, psychological, and legal. Those who broke silence were the targets of ridicule and defamation seldom surpassed in the annals of American political vitriol, and women who spoke openly were often threatened with death. The attacks, furthermore, were led by "gentlemen of property and standing" - preachers, editors, and even reformers - as well as by women like Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's oldest sister, who played the role in the 1830s that women like Phyllis Schlafley have played in ours: to keep firm hold on their piece of the action, they took the position that the way men ran the world was just dandy." page 234

      16) "To be called a "Fanny Wrightist" was roughly equivalent to being called a communist in the 1950s, and a whole string of abolitionist women like Abbey Kelley assured their audiences that they were not Fanny Wrightists. When truth-telling is so ill-rewarded, it is scarcely surprising that most people choose to know nothing whatever." page 235

      17) "Women who believe that what happens to other women is not their business run the risk of discovering that they're badly mistaken." page 253

      18) "African-American law professor Margaret A. Burnham summarized our lesson: "What this nomination process taught is that black progress and progress for women are inextricably linked in contemporary American politics, and that each group suffers when it fails to grasp the dimensions of the other's struggle." page 256

      19) ". . . the National Institute of Mental Health found that one in twelve college men actually admitted that he'd raped or tried to rape a woman. In states ike Texas and California, where women are politically conspicuous, the figures are much higher, suggesting that men's anxiety increases to toxic levels as women advance in their quest for equality." page 265

      20) "In the face of indifference and even hostility, then, the woman who has been harassed or abused - and who refuses to call the sun the moon - must find a group that supports her, along with a constructive way to channel her pain and outrage." page 303

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