One thing I think we must know - that our traditional gender roles will not be part of the future, as long as the future is not a new Stone Age. Our traditions, our books, our morals, our manners, our films, our speech, our economic organization, everything we have inherited, tell us that to be a Man one must bend Nature to one's will - or other men. This means ecological catastrophe in the first instance and war in the second. To be a Woman, one must be first and foremost a mother and after that a server of Men; this means overpopulation and the perpetuation of the first two disasters. The roles are deadly. The myths that serve them are fatal. Women cannot write - using the old myths. But using new ones - ?

Slutningen på Joanna Russ' strålende essay "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write" (1971)