I was raised to be a good girl. Embedded in this phrase was the admonition to never talk back to my elders, and I did OK until I was six years old. Then one summer Sunday, itching to go out to play, I asked to be excused from the formal dinner, and my father’s response was that I needed to stay at the table until he and my mother had finished their cigarettes. So I fixed him with a look of disgust and said, “Well, then, can I have a cigarette?”Things went downhill from there. By the time I was ten I had been labeled a troublemaker for my overactive mouth. This isn’t to say that things were all that troubling. My talking back to authority was so admired by the other kids at Loreto Convent School in Normanhurst, Australia, that they elected me school captain—a first, and probably a last, for an American kid. At university in the U.S., my parents looked away while I traded school terms for participation in protests against various forms of injustice. When my father finally sat me down to try to talk some sense into me, he ended up agreeing with me—and turning against the war in Vietnam. This was a huge shi …