Some women talked about what happens when they start to talk with other women about lives. For many of us, this process of consciousness can be painful.

• I guess, probably, where it sort of just filters down into probably a lot of small things, or not small things, but things that are subtle. Then you realize that you've thought about them...It's funny. You look at it and then you start to see all these little layers underneath. It's really strange.

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• Thank god that we can't go on all day thinking in these terms. That we just get on with making lunch. Because I just feel paralyzed with what we're talking about. The intensity of fear, rage, all that stuff. I couldn't live with feeling this every minute of my day. I wouldn't function.

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• I think that pretty well most of the women there would call themselves feminist at this point. But, when it all started, they weren't looking in that direction. They were just women who wanted to get together. But you can't get a group of women together who don't begin to realize that there's real common grounds here. The common grounds have to do with the fact that we're women, they're men.

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• How do they get to the space where they feel safe enough to even think about it as an option? I mean how many women really think that they have the right to go off and meet on their own for their own good?

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• In one situation, as women spoke together during the research, they came to see their similarities. "I'm just like her. That's all." This is a phrase said several times of women who spoke before and who are also significantly "different" in terms of such things as age, economic class, ethnicity.

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• There are not too many places we can go from [a discussion of the problems]. And I think going back and forth into discussion- from local to global-from global to local- action and reflection is key. But how do you do that without being really despondent. Because there are no mechanisms. State mechanisms are completely useless, human rights...

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• It seems that the more conscious we become of ourselves as women, the more we get a heightened sense of how vulnerable we all are as women. And the more everyone be- comes conscious of us as women, the more vulnerable we become We feel increasingly vulnerable because we are concentrating on ourselves as women and others were talking about us as women, and that becomes quite-I don't know what the word would be, we don't have a word-"Nerviness"-like a heightened awareness that has a bit of fear in it and that talks about violence that's out there. As soon as you're singled out as a "woman," there's the spectre of violence.

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• The problem of inside and outside-people are kind of incestuously bound inside and ... [issues of sexism] cannot be dealt with in isolation... It all comes to the surface. Do I want to know that? Do I want to know how X thinks of me in terms of me, in terms of my life. It is very scary. It is so much easier to do it outside because then you are one person, and the others, the social relations, are not intertwined. So it is relatively safe.

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