Politics & Power Quote by Anna Quindlen

Quindlen slips the knife in with a smile: the big feminist breakthrough she’s imagining comes packaged as a petty travel complaint and a sight gag. “I would even go to Washington” sets her persona as allergic to capital-pageantry and political self-importance; the payoff is that she’d endure all that anyway for a moment of genuine civic correction. That contrast does the persuasive work. It frames women’s exclusion from the presidency as not merely unjust but absurdly overdue - so overdue it can redeem Washington itself.

“Jane Q. Public” is the masterstroke. Quindlen isn’t fantasizing about a celebrity savior or a once-in-a-generation genius; she’s insisting the office should finally be ordinary-accessible. The name drains the story of hero worship and replaces it with a democratic dare: if the nation is what it claims to be, why hasn’t an average woman been allowed to represent it at the top?

Then she lands the cultural critique where it stings: the “husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat.” The hat isn’t random. It’s a shorthand for how femininity is staged, policed, and mocked in public life - and how “first lady” has historically been a role built out of costume, decorum, and supportive silence. By putting that costume on the man, Quindlen exposes the whole arrangement as theatrical and faintly ridiculous, which is exactly her point. Equality isn’t just a new occupant in the Oval Office; it’s the inversion of a script that has treated women as ornamental to male power. The joke lands because it’s plausible, and because it reveals how unthinkingly we’ve accepted the old tableau as natural.