Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Hampton

Hampton’s line lands like a drawing-room barb: capitalism isn’t a system of markets and incentives, it’s a machine for producing a particular kind of person. By choosing “American girls” and “American women,” he narrows the target to a gendered coming-of-age story, then flips it into an economic diagnosis. The joke is acidic because it treats “definition” as a trap; you expect an abstract answer, you get a social one. Capitalism becomes less a set of rules than a rite of passage, with the punchline that adulthood, in this version, is purchased.

The subtext is about training: desire disciplined into taste, spontaneity refined into presentation, innocence traded for competence. “Process” does heavy lifting. It suggests an assembly line, not a journey - a conveyor belt that turns youth into a legible consumer and a legible product. The phrase implies that capitalism doesn’t merely sell to women; it teaches women how to be sold, how to self-package, how to curate an identity that reads as successful. The American qualifier matters, too: this is the cultural script exported as aspiration, the brand of adulthood where empowerment and consumption can become hard to separate.

As a playwright, Hampton is playing to the theater’s core talent: making ideology visible through manners and metamorphosis. The line is compact enough to sound like cocktail chatter, sharp enough to sting like critique. It works because it treats capitalism as something intimate and bodily - not just what you do with money, but what money does to you.