Parenting & Family Quote by Gloria Steinem

It lands like a slap because it flips the moralizing gaze: the “risk factor” isn’t women’s supposed irresponsibility, it’s men’s ability to disappear. Steinem compresses an entire welfare-state argument into a single unit of distance: one man. That phrase carries the threat of abandonment, unemployment, divorce, death, incarceration, even plain indifference. The point isn’t that mothers are fragile; it’s that the system is built to make them precarious.

The subtext is an indictment of how policy has treated caregiving as a private hobby rather than public infrastructure. If a household’s economic stability hinges on one adult’s continued presence, that’s not “personal failure,” it’s a design choice: wages that don’t support a family, childcare priced like luxury goods, benefits tied to marital status or punitive eligibility tests, and a cultural script that assumes a male breadwinner will reliably backstop the whole arrangement. Steinem’s line also exposes how “welfare” gets weaponized as stigma. She doesn’t romanticize dependency; she points out that dependency is already baked in, just hidden inside marriage.

Context matters: Steinem’s activism sits in the long fight over women’s economic citizenship - equal pay, reproductive autonomy, childcare, and the right to leave bad relationships without financial ruin. The sentence is intentionally blunt, even accusatory, because it’s trying to reroute shame away from mothers and toward the structures - and the men - who are rarely asked to account for the consequences of their absence.