Aging & Wisdom Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein’s line lands like a dry aside, but it’s also a scalpel: the “problem” isn’t that young people are confused about work-life balance, it’s that only one gender is expected to be confused. By framing it as something she “still” doesn’t hear on campuses, Stein turns the lecture circuit into a diagnostic tool. The audience is modernity-in-training, supposedly the birthplace of new ideas, yet the same old silence persists. The rhetorical trick is simple and devastating: she quotes the absent question. In doing so, she makes the missing voice audible and indictable.

The subtext is about cultural default settings. Women are raised to treat “career and family” as a single, messy package deal; men are raised to treat family as optional, or as a problem someone else will manage. Stein doesn’t argue this directly. She lets the asymmetry announce itself through what doesn’t happen: no young man stands up, no public anxiety, no demand for strategies. The campus setting matters because it’s where ambition is openly cultivated and rewarded. If men aren’t being trained to see family as part of that ambition, the inequality isn’t just personal, it’s institutional.

There’s also a sly critique of progress narratives. “Still” punctures the idea that education automatically modernizes gender roles. Stein’s intent isn’t to shame individual men so much as to expose how even enlightened spaces reproduce old bargains: women plan for double shifts; men plan for uninterrupted lives.