Faith & Spirit Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

Luce’s line lands like a cocktail-party barb with a blade inside it: witty, devout on the surface, and quietly insurgent underneath. By framing her argument as a theological question, she hijacks the moral vocabulary often used to police women’s roles and flips it into a defense of women’s intellect. The joke works because it pretends to accept the premise of “God’s design” while sabotaging the conclusion. If you’re going to invoke nature or Providence to keep women in the domestic lane, she implies, you have to answer for the inconvenient fact of women’s minds.

The specific intent is counterpunching a familiar reduction: women as reproductive organs with decorative speech attached. “Wombs” is deliberately blunt; it refuses the polite euphemisms that make sexism sound like tradition. “Brain” arrives as the punchline and the proof, a single word that turns biology from a cage into an exhibit for the defense.

Subtextually, Luce is not rejecting femininity so much as rejecting the demand that femininity be destiny. The rhetorical question is also a trap: disagreeing makes you sound anti-reason, anti-creation, or both. In an era when women’s public ambition was routinely caricatured as unnatural, she offers a portable argument that travels well across dinner tables, theaters, and political conversations.

Context matters: Luce moved through elite media and power circles that prized cleverness but rationed authority. The line is less a manifesto than a survival tactic turned into art: use humor to smuggle a radical claim - that women’s thinking is not an exception to the rule, but part of the design.