Parenting & Family Quote by Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Pogrebin’s line works like a moral boomerang: whatever violence adults rationalize behind closed doors comes whipping back as public policy, street logic, and international posture. She’s not merely condemning abuse; she’s dismantling the comforting fiction that “home” is separate from “the world.” The intent is surgical: relocate family violence from the realm of private tragedy to the realm of civic consequence, where it can’t hide behind euphemisms like “discipline,” “family matter,” or “it’s complicated.”

The subtext is about pedagogy. Children don’t just suffer violence; they study it. They learn who gets to speak, who must yield, what conflict resolution looks like when power is the only vocabulary. “Might makes right” isn’t presented as an abstract political theory but as a household lesson plan, repeated until it feels normal. Pogrebin’s question implies a grim continuity: the same impulse that throws a punch in a kitchen scales up to coercion in a courtroom, a workplace, a border.

Context matters: Pogrebin, a feminist writer steeped in late-20th-century debates over domestic abuse, masculinity, and the politics of “privacy,” is pushing against a culture that treats violence as both inevitable and oddly honorable when it’s framed as protection or control. The rhetorical move is smartly disarming: she doesn’t accuse; she asks “how will we hope,” forcing the reader to admit the contradiction of preaching peace abroad while tolerating brutality at home. The word “futile” lands as indictment and diagnosis: force feels decisive, but it’s a dead-end habit we teach early, then spend lifetimes pretending we didn’t learn.