Parenting & Family Quote by James Thurber

Thurber lands this line with the deceptively gentle force of a banana peel: you laugh, then realize you’ve slipped on an indictment. “I think that maybe” is faux-modest throat-clearing, the kind of hedging that makes a radical suggestion sound like a casual aside. It’s a comedian’s tactic for smuggling critique past defenses. Then comes the real turn of the screw: “women and children” aren’t framed as equals to male leadership but as the very people excluded from it, the ones presumed too sentimental, too irrational, too powerless to govern. Thurber flips that assumption without writing a manifesto.

The subtext is less “women are better” than “men in charge have been spectacularly unimpressive.” In the early-to-mid 20th century - Thurber’s America of world wars, industrial bureaucracy, clubby boardrooms - “getting somewhere” reads as an exhausted plea against institutional stagnation and macho catastrophe. The joke works because it’s both outrageous and obvious: outrageous in a culture that treated leadership as male birthright, obvious to anyone watching those leaders steer into calamity with straight faces.

Pairing women with children is the line’s most strategic provocation. It’s intentionally insulting to patriarchal logic (equating women with minors) while also highlighting the moral blind spot of governance: policy is routinely made without those who most directly suffer its consequences. Thurber’s cynicism isn’t nihilistic; it’s corrective. If the self-anointed adults keep breaking the world, maybe the people forced to live in the fallout deserve the keys.