Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

The battles after the wars are over can be the toughest; there's no longer the public interest that accompanies, for good and for ill, the start of combat.

Girls grow up scarred by caution and enter adulthood eager to shake free of their parents' worst nightmares. They still know to be wary of strangers. What they don't know is whether they have more to fear from their friends.