Parenting & Family Quote by Isabel Allende

“Feminism is dated?” lands like a cocktail of impatience and seduction: a question that pretends to entertain a trendy dismissal, then snaps shut with a moral accounting. Allende’s intent is corrective, but also strategic. She doesn’t waste time arguing with the idea that feminism is obsolete; she concedes it narrowly, “Yes,” only to reveal the concession as a trap. Dated for whom? The answer is class, geography, and the quiet insulation of comfort.

The subtext is a rebuke aimed at a particular kind of complacency: the affluent, educated audience that can afford to treat equality as a solved problem, even a branding problem. By naming “my daughter and all of us here today,” Allende implicates herself and her listeners in the privilege they might prefer to keep abstract. That small act of self-inclusion matters; it prevents the speech from turning into a guilt-free charitable gaze toward “women over there.” It says: our freedom is real, but it is also partial, contingent, and unevenly distributed.

Contextually, the quote sits in the long afterglow of second-wave feminism meeting a globalized world. “Premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor” is not decorative outrage; it’s a deliberate inventory of systems that turn women’s bodies into infrastructure for other people’s economies and honor codes. The final clause, about having children they “don’t want or… cannot feed,” shifts from spectacle to consequence. It’s not just about rights as ideals; it’s about life chances, coerced reproduction, and hunger. Allende makes feminism feel less like a campus argument and more like an emergency still in progress.