"It is undeniable that a woman's ability to stretch and pursue her total competence outside the home and get paid what she's worth for it makes for happier and more fulfilled women"
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Pruett’s line is doing two things at once: validating women’s work beyond the home and quietly indicting the structures that have long pretended that work doesn’t count. The key maneuver is the pairing of “stretch” with “total competence.” “Stretch” implies growth and self-expansion, a body-and-mind metaphor that makes domestic confinement feel like enforced shrinking. “Total competence” pushes back against the old split that treats women as naturally skilled caretakers but only conditionally competent in public life. It’s not just permission to leave the home; it’s an insistence that the full range of ability is real, legible, and meant to be used.
Then the sentence snaps into economics: “get paid what she’s worth.” That clause carries the subtext that women already do valuable labor, but the market (and often the family) has historically underpriced it. Paid work isn’t framed as a vanity project or “having it all”; it’s framed as recognition. Happiness and fulfillment aren’t presented as airy self-help outcomes, but as the predictable result of autonomy plus fair compensation. The implicit argument is that dignity is materially reinforced.
The context reads like late-20th/early-21st-century professional-class feminism: workforce participation is treated as a pathway to selfhood, with wage equity as the moral baseline. The risk is in the word “undeniable,” which tries to pre-empt debate while skating past hard questions about class, caregiving infrastructure, and the women for whom “outside the home” isn’t liberation so much as necessity. Still, the sentence works because it refuses the sentimental compromise: fulfillment isn’t a gift society grants; it’s something women earn and must be paid for.
Then the sentence snaps into economics: “get paid what she’s worth.” That clause carries the subtext that women already do valuable labor, but the market (and often the family) has historically underpriced it. Paid work isn’t framed as a vanity project or “having it all”; it’s framed as recognition. Happiness and fulfillment aren’t presented as airy self-help outcomes, but as the predictable result of autonomy plus fair compensation. The implicit argument is that dignity is materially reinforced.
The context reads like late-20th/early-21st-century professional-class feminism: workforce participation is treated as a pathway to selfhood, with wage equity as the moral baseline. The risk is in the word “undeniable,” which tries to pre-empt debate while skating past hard questions about class, caregiving infrastructure, and the women for whom “outside the home” isn’t liberation so much as necessity. Still, the sentence works because it refuses the sentimental compromise: fulfillment isn’t a gift society grants; it’s something women earn and must be paid for.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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