Motherhood Quote by Al Capp

A barb dressed up as common sense, Al Capp's line aims straight at the American pressure point where sex, poverty, and morality get tangled into policy. Coming from a cartoonist who made a career out of skewering sanctimony, the intent isn't gentle persuasion; it's provocation. Capp frames "unwed mothers on welfare" as a social problem you can solve with a shrug and a work order, and the insult is baked into the phrasing: "as far as ... are concerned" reduces real people to a category, then "must be capable" pretends to offer a reasonable inference while smuggling in contempt.

The subtext does two things at once. First, it treats welfare as a reward for irresponsibility, not a stopgap in a labor market that often blocks women with children from stable work. Second, it makes "labor" do double duty. On the surface it's employment, but the word choice can't help echoing reproductive labor, suggesting that if these women can bear children, they can bear any job. It's a neat rhetorical trick: it converts motherhood into evidence against deserving help, turning capacity into culpability.

Context matters because "unwed mothers" was a cultural panic button in mid-century America, a shorthand for "moral failure" coded with class and, in practice, often race. Capp is playing to an audience primed to laugh at the idea that welfare recipients are idle, while dodging the structural reality: childcare costs, gendered hiring discrimination, and low wages that make work and survival incompatible. The line works because it's punchy and plausible at a glance, then corrosive once you notice how much it assumes about who gets to count as industrious.