Politics & Power Quote by Richard M. Nixon

Nixon’s prediction reads like progress with a stopwatch in its hand: inevitability, yes, but carefully time-boxed, managed, and rhetorically contained. “Certainly” is doing heavy lifting. It’s a word politicians use to launder optimism into authority, to make a social shift sound less like conflict and more like scheduling. The promise feels bold until you notice the horizon line: 50 years. That’s not just foresight; it’s permission to postpone.

The subtext is classic Nixonian triangulation. He affirms women’s political equality in the abstract (“can and should”), but he frames it through comparison to men rather than competence on its own terms. The sentence grants access by measuring women against the male baseline, which is both an endorsement and a reminder of who still defines the job. Equality arrives as a logical conclusion, not a moral reckoning; the language avoids naming sexism, barriers, parties, institutions - the messy machinery that keeps predictions from becoming reality.

Context matters: second-wave feminism was forcing the question into mainstream politics, and the women’s rights movement was becoming too visible to patronize away. Nixon, a master of reading the electorate, offers reassurance to modernizers without spooking traditionalists: the idea is safe because it’s framed as incremental and inevitable, not disruptive and urgent.

With the benefit of history, the line lands as both prescient and revealingly cautious. It’s the sound of the establishment conceding the direction of travel while trying to control the speed.