Violence may be a good focus to organize around, but we have to look at women's lives in our entirety.

I want to organize so that women see ourselves as people who are entitled to power, entitled to leadership.

We always knew when we took on the issue of violence against women that somehow our opposition would come after us.

Some of us may just, in one-on-one conversations with our family, with our friends, over the back fence with our neighbors, talk about the reality of our lives and realize that we're not alone, that we have a right to be physically safe and emotionally safe in our own homes.

We have to stop this violence. We have to make the political nature of the violence clear, that the violence we experience in our own homes is not a personal family matter, it's a public and political problem. It's a way that women are kept in line, kept in our places.

I know that it isn't just violence against women, it's how do we support ourselves and our families, how do we deal with health care for ourselves and our families? It's a bigger picture.