Politics & Power Quote by Sara Paretsky

Paretsky’s line lands like a casual recollection and then tightens into an indictment. The surface narrative is almost plain: rural Kansas, the 1950s, a set of expectations. But the sentence is engineered to expose how “expectations” functioned as policy. By framing the norm as something “expected,” she points to a social script so pervasive it didn’t need enforcement by law; it was enforced by atmosphere, by neighbors, by schools that quietly rationed ambition. The bluntness of “a waste of time” is doing heavy work. It’s not just that girls were discouraged from learning; the culture calculated their education as squandered resources, an economic argument disguised as common sense.

The specificity matters. “Conservative rural Kansas” isn’t decoration; it locates the story in a mythic heartland often marketed as wholesome and stable. Paretsky reveals the cost of that stability: a narrow life path sold as natural. The subtext is that sexism wasn’t merely personal prejudice, it was infrastructure, shaping what could be imagined as a future.

Coming from a novelist who built a career writing tough, competent female protagonists, the quote reads as origin story without sentimentality. It explains the fuel behind her work: not abstract empowerment, but a clear memory of being told your mind was surplus. The intent is less to ask for sympathy than to make the old logic sound as ugly as it always was, and to remind readers how recently it passed for normal.