"A gentleman opposed to their enfranchisement once said to me, women have never produced anything of any value to the world. I told him the chief product of the women had been the men, and left it to him to decide whether the product was of any value"
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She flips a smug anti-suffrage put-down into a trapdoor, and the elegance is in how quickly it snaps shut. The “gentleman” delivers a familiar Victorian insult dressed up as reason: if women haven’t “produced” value, they don’t deserve political power. Shaw’s response refuses to argue on his terms for even a second. Instead, she hijacks his favorite metric - production - and points out the most obvious output of women’s labor: men themselves.
The punchline lands because it forces a choice the opponent can’t take without self-humiliation. If men are valuable, then women have produced something valuable; if men aren’t, his own standing collapses. Shaw turns the era’s reverence for “gentlemanly” authority into a liability, exposing how the argument is less about evidence than about whose work counts as work. Childbearing and caregiving are treated as natural background noise, not as social production deserving rights. By reframing “product,” she smuggles domestic labor into the public ledger where political claims are tallied.
Context matters: Shaw was a prominent U.S. suffrage leader and a gifted orator in a movement constantly asked to prove women’s worthiness rather than men’s entitlement. Her line doesn’t plead for inclusion; it mocks the premise. The subtext is ruthless: you already depend on women for everything from literal existence to moral education, and yet you call them unproductive. The joke is a cudgel, and it works because it makes patriarchy answer itself.
The punchline lands because it forces a choice the opponent can’t take without self-humiliation. If men are valuable, then women have produced something valuable; if men aren’t, his own standing collapses. Shaw turns the era’s reverence for “gentlemanly” authority into a liability, exposing how the argument is less about evidence than about whose work counts as work. Childbearing and caregiving are treated as natural background noise, not as social production deserving rights. By reframing “product,” she smuggles domestic labor into the public ledger where political claims are tallied.
Context matters: Shaw was a prominent U.S. suffrage leader and a gifted orator in a movement constantly asked to prove women’s worthiness rather than men’s entitlement. Her line doesn’t plead for inclusion; it mocks the premise. The subtext is ruthless: you already depend on women for everything from literal existence to moral education, and yet you call them unproductive. The joke is a cudgel, and it works because it makes patriarchy answer itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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