Time & Perspective Quote by Jeanette Rankin

Regret usually arrives dressed as softness: I should have been kinder, gentler, easier. Rankin flips that script and, in doing so, exposes the sentimental trap set for women in public life. “Nastier” isn’t a confession of cruelty; it’s a refusal of the likability tax. Coming from the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress - and a principled dissenter who voted against both World Wars - the word lands like a provocation aimed at the rules of respectability that were used to manage her.

The line works because it’s both personal and structural. On the surface, it’s a late-life reassessment: I paid too much for politeness. Underneath, it’s an indictment of a political culture that treats moral clarity as abrasive when it comes from certain mouths. Rankin had to be palatable to be heard, and she watched that strategy get weaponized against her anyway: dissent gets recast as hysteria, ambition as arrogance, conviction as “difficult.”

“Nastier” also reads as a tactical term. Politics rewards people willing to withstand mischaracterization, to push past gatekeepers, to say no without softening the edges for the comfort of the room. Rankin is naming the asymmetry: men can be “tough,” women become “nasty.” By reclaiming the slur, she turns it into a tool - not to harm others, but to stop harming herself through endless self-editing. It’s a compact manifesto for anyone who’s ever been told that effectiveness and niceness are the same thing.