Politics & Power Quote by John Adams

A line like this lands today with the blunt force of a slammed door: politics is real business, and you are not invited. Coming from John Adams, it’s not just casual sexism; it’s a performance of 18th-century political order. The sentence is staged as restraint ("I must not"), as if he’s following some higher rule of propriety rather than enforcing a boundary that benefits him. That little posture of duty launders exclusion into etiquette.

The context sharpens the irony. Adams wrote extensively to Abigail Adams, who was hardly a passive recipient; she famously urged him to "remember the ladies" as the new nation defined its laws. Their correspondence is often celebrated as unusually intimate and intellectually alive for the era, which makes this line feel less like a settled belief than a tactical move in a larger marital-political negotiation. It can read as a warning: the stakes are high, the room is full of spies, and even domestic conversation should be policed. It can also read as defensive: a statesman trying to keep authority intact when confronted with a spouse whose mind threatens the fiction that governance is a male monopoly.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it compresses a whole constitution of inequality into a single reason clause: "because you are a woman". No argument, no evidence, just category. In a republic supposedly built on consent and representation, Adams reveals how quickly the universal becomes conditional, and how often power hides behind manners.