Politics & Power Quote by Shirley Chisholm

Chisholm’s line lands like a polite sentence with a not-so-polite diagnosis: politics is exactly where America is failing its own ideals. By saying the country "needs" women’s idealism and determination, she flips the usual patronizing script of the era, where women were invited into public life as helpers, moral mascots, or symbolic proof of progress. Chisholm isn’t asking for a seat; she’s describing a shortage. The implication is that the political system has normalized cynicism, inertia, and backroom pragmatism so thoroughly that it now requires an outside infusion of principle and grit to function.

The pairing of "idealism" and "determination" is doing strategic work. Idealism alone can be dismissed as naivete; determination alone can be reduced to ambition. Together, they form a political identity that is both values-driven and battle-tested, a rebuttal to the idea that women would "soften" politics. Chisholm argues they can harden it in the right ways: against corruption, against complacency, against the quiet violence of neglect.

Context matters: Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to Congress and later the first Black major-party candidate for president (1972), navigating a Democratic establishment and a feminist movement that didn’t always make room for Black women. Her "perhaps more in politics than anywhere else" is a scalpel twist: if democracy is supposed to be the nation’s moral engine, why does it most urgently need repair?