Politics & Power Quote by Coretta Scott King

King is doing something deceptively brash here: she treats women voters not as a “special interest,” but as a sleeping supermajority. The ten percent figure is less a statistic than a dare. It’s small enough to feel achievable, big enough to sound like political gravity. She’s not fantasizing about a revolution; she’s describing how little pressure it would take to make elected officials stop treating women-and-children programs as the easiest line items to sacrifice.

The intent is mobilization, but the subtext is sharper: budget cuts aren’t neutral bookkeeping. They’re choices made in a system that assumes women will absorb the fallout privately through unpaid labor, patchwork caregiving, and lowered expectations. When she links turnout directly to “an end” to cuts, she’s calling out the cynical math of politics: if a bloc votes reliably, it gets courted; if it doesn’t, it gets managed.

Context matters. King came out of the civil rights tradition where voting wasn’t a civic nicety but a contested instrument of survival. By the late 20th century, the fights over social spending, welfare, childcare, and education were increasingly framed as fiscal prudence, not moral priorities. Her line flips that frame: austerity is a policy preference enabled by predictable disengagement.

There’s also an implicit rebuke to patronizing narratives about women’s political power. She refuses to cast women as merely victims of cuts; she casts them as the actors who can make cuts politically toxic. The sentence is a lever, not a lament.