Daily Inspiration Quote by Bella Abzug

All of the men on my staff can type is a small grenade disguised as office trivia. Bella Abzug, the brash congresswoman-lawyer who barreled into Washington in the early 1970s, knows exactly what she is doing: she takes a job task historically assigned to women and hands it to men without apology. The line lands because it reverses the unspoken hierarchy of the professional workplace, where men were presumed to be the thinkers and women the support system, even when women were equally credentialed.

Abzug’s intent is not to praise her staff’s clerical versatility. It’s to puncture the smug assumptions built into hiring, status, and who is expected to serve whom. The subtext reads: competence includes the so-called menial work, and no one gets to outsource it based on gender. She also refuses the polite feminist posture of requesting space; she asserts authority as normal, and that blunt normality is the provocation.

Context matters: Abzug entered politics after years of lawyering in a culture where female professionals were routinely treated as secretaries, regardless of résumé. Even the idea of a powerful woman with staff could trigger a reflexive question: who does the typing? Her answer anticipates the question and mocks it, exposing how deeply workplace sexism relies on invisible labor being gendered.

It works rhetorically because it’s funny, quotable, and mildly scandalous without being abstract. One sentence turns a stereotype into a management policy, and that’s Abzug’s signature: feminism not as theory, but as a daily redistribution of dignity.