well as physics; any idea pushed into the popular mind with considerable
force will keep on going until some opposing force--or the slow
resistance of friction--stops it at last.

"Society" consists mostly of women. Women carry on most of its
processes, therefore women are its makers and masters, they are
responsible for it, that is the general belief.

We might as well hold women responsible for harems--or prisoners for
jails. To be helplessly confined to a given place or condition does not
prove that one has chosen it; much less made it.

No; in an androcentric culture "society," like every other social
relation, is dominated by the male and arranged for his convenience.
There are, of course, modifications due to the presence of the other
sex; where there are more women than men there are inevitable results of
their influence; but the character and conditions of the whole
performance are dictated by men.

Social intercourse is the prime condition of human life. To meet, to
mingle, to know one another, to exchange, not only definite ideas,
facts, and feelings, but to experience that vague general stimulus and
enlarged power that comes of contact--all this is essential to our
happiness as well as to our progress.

This grand desideratum has always been monopolized by men as far as
possible. What intercourse was allowed to women has been rigidly hemmed
its by man-made conventions. Women accept these conventions, repeat
them, enforce them upon their daughters; but they originate with men.