Justice & Law Quote by Joseph McCabe

McCabe’s “I AM” lands like a declaration and a dare: he’s not flirting with feminism as a polite opinion, he’s staking identity on a label that was already contested in his day. The capitalization reads like a rebuttal in advance, a preemptive answer to the smug question of why a man should be “what is called” a feminist. That small, distancing phrase - “what is called” - signals the cultural static around the term: feminism is something society names, suspects, caricatures. McCabe accepts the tag anyway, but keeps enough irony to show he understands the sneer it often carries.

The pivot from monastery to “sane human existence” is the quote’s sharpest blade. He frames religious life as an enforced unreality, and modern secular life as the return to baseline. In that context, defending women’s rights becomes less a heroic conversion than an almost unavoidable consequence of seeing the world plainly. His timeline (“within two or three years”) is doing rhetorical work: feminism isn’t portrayed as an exotic ideology he studied into; it’s presented as a practical moral reflex that followed once he exited an institution built on obedience, hierarchy, and male authority.

There’s also a self-aware critique of his former world hiding in the speed of the change. If clarity arrives that quickly, then the monastery didn’t just fail to teach justice; it trained him not to notice injustice at all. McCabe’s intent is to normalize feminism as sanity, and to indict the social machinery - especially clerical power - that makes equality look radical.