Politics & Power Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

A line like this lands because it weaponizes the mundane. Clare Boothe Luce stacks the small, tactile tasks of political labor - type the letters, lick the stamps, distribute the pamphlets - until they feel like a conveyor belt of unpaid or uncredited competence. The verbs are brisk, almost clerical music, and then she snaps the rhythm with a final, blunt clause: "Men get elected". The punch is its simplicity. No moralizing, no policy talk, just the crude accounting of who does the work and who gets the trophy.

The specific intent is indictment, but the subtext is more acidic: the political system doesn’t merely exclude women; it domesticates them inside the campaign. Women are welcome as infrastructure, as the invisible engine of persuasion and turnout, as long as ambition stops short of authority. Even "get out the vote" reads like a sly reminder that women are trusted to mobilize democracy, not embody it.

Context matters: Luce wasn’t speaking from the sidelines. As a prominent dramatist who became a congresswoman and a major conservative voice, she understood both performance and power. Her theatrical training shows in the staging - a list of props and gestures that conjures a backroom full of women doing the campaign’s real logistics. The line also carries an uncomfortable edge of complicity: if women are doing so much to install men, what social bargain, what habit of deference, keeps the cycle turning? It’s less a lament than a spotlight, harsh and unflattering, on politics as a gendered division of labor disguised as civic virtue.