Parenting & Family Quote by Kate Millett

Millett packs a provocation into a casual “probably,” then detonates it with the second line. The opening claim about women being “more protective of children” sounds like a nod to maternal instinct, almost a concession to conventional gender scripts. That softness is strategic: it invites the listener in with something legible, even agreeable, before she flips the frame. The real point isn’t biology. It’s power.

“Also, we’ve been minors all of our history” is a brutal legal metaphor that reframes womanhood as a condition imposed by institutions. A minor can’t fully contract, own, travel, decide, or be taken seriously without permission; Millett is reminding you that for centuries women have existed in precisely that curtailed status, socially and often literally under the law. The line works because it compresses a sprawling history of coverture, disenfranchisement, and economic dependency into one word that’s both domestic and juridical. “Minor” sounds like paperwork. That’s the horror: patriarchy as administration.

The subtext is double-edged. If women have been trained into protectiveness, it’s not simply “nature” but survival and responsibility forced onto people denied full agency. And if women are treated as children by society, their care for actual children becomes both authentic solidarity and a politically useful role: you can be dismissed as sentimental while being relied upon to hold the moral center together.

Coming from a second-wave feminist activist who argued that “sexual politics” structures public life, the quote reads as a corrective to patronizing narratives. Millett isn’t asking for praise; she’s naming the paradox of being tasked with guardianship while denied adulthood.