Quotes from Peggy Orenstein

American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior.

Fully half the girls had experienced something along a spectrum of coercion to rape. Those stories were agonizing; equally upsetting, only two had previously told another adult what had happened.

Young people are not tabulae rasae. They have a sense of right and wrong. But if they're repeatedly exposed to certain themes, they are more likely to pick them up, to internalize them and have them become part of their sexual scripts.

Encouraging girls to explore sexuality within mutually caring, emotionally connected relationships is one thing; insisting on it is another.

Simpson Rowe was quick to say that only perpetrators are responsible for assault, but assertiveness and self-advocacy are crucial defensive skills.

Identify, I've learned, can be sliced many ways and there is gain with every loss.

Maybe learning to live with the question marks, recognizing that closure does not always occur, is all I really needed to do. I hadn't expected, coming from a world that fights to see life's beginnings in black and white, to be so comforted by a shade of gray. The notion of the water child made sense to me. What I had experienced was not a full life, nor was it a full death, but it was a real loss.

Making something from nothing is the quintessential magic of women, whether turning fiber to thread or flour to bread or engaging in the ultimate creative act: conjuring new humans from nowhere at all.