Life & Wisdom Quote by Warren Farrell

The flex here is oddly double-edged: Farrell isn’t just claiming credibility, he’s claiming rarity. “The only man” works like a spotlight and a warning label at the same time. It signals insider status in a movement widely coded as women’s terrain, while quietly reminding you that male legitimacy there is exceptional, contingent, and therefore narratable.

Context matters: early-1970s NOW is a high-visibility engine of second-wave feminism, building institutional power in big-city chapters and fighting for policy wins. Farrell’s phrasing borrows the movement’s own language of representation (elected, board) and turns it into a personal credential. That’s not incidental. It frames him as democratically validated by feminist women, which preempts the most predictable critique he’d later face: that men’s-advocacy arguments are opportunistic or reactionary. The sentence is a kind of inoculation.

The subtext is also about media economics. Being “well recognized” isn’t just social standing; it’s cultural capital you can spend. The movement becomes a résumé line, the chapter becomes a stage, and “New York City” adds the implicit stamp of influence: not just any NOW board, but the one presumed to matter.

There’s a tension humming underneath. By emphasizing “only man,” Farrell is both celebrating inclusion and underscoring segregation. The triumph he describes also betrays the limits of the era’s gender politics: even in a liberation movement, male participation had to be exceptional enough to be newsworthy, and useful enough to be repeatedly ratified.