"Woman is an imperfect creature," a character in Cervantes's Don Quixote declares, "and you must not put stumbling-blocks in her path, so that she may trip and fall, but rather clear her road of every obstacle, so that she may run free and unburdened to gain the perfection she lacks, which consists…

In 1941, when I was in the seventh grade, I elected the academic instead of a vocational program at my junior high school. I lived with my divorced mother, a secretary and the family's only high school graduate. My teacher asked what I wanted to be; "a lawyer," I said, and I said it with fear. My…