Parenting & Family Quote by Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge’s line lands like a confession that doubles as an indictment. She frames her distance from feminism not as ideology but as inheritance: a learned script in which domestic life is a sealed, female-run economy and men are reduced to payroll. The bluntness is the point. It’s not “men were oppressive” or “women were empowered,” but a colder arrangement: everyone has a job, nobody is whole.

The subtext is pricklier than it first appears. “Never been drawn” sounds like personal taste, yet the next sentence reveals how little “choice” is in play. Bainbridge isn’t bragging about traditionalism; she’s showing how tradition produces its own emotional logic, one that can make political movements feel irrelevant or even suspect. If men “had little to do” with children, then feminist demands for equality inside the home don’t register as liberation so much as a disturbance of the only order you’ve been taught to trust.

Context matters: Bainbridge grew up in mid-century Britain, where postwar austerity and rigid gender roles were still a living atmosphere, and where second-wave feminism arrived as both a moral challenge and a practical renegotiation of labor. As a novelist, she’s tuned to the mechanics of domestic arrangements and their quiet cruelties. The sentence doesn’t absolve men; it diminishes them. It also hints at the cost to women: if the home is your assigned kingdom, it can be a prison with good curtains.

What makes the quote work is its refusal to perform the “right” politics. It gives us the messy origin story of a worldview and dares the reader to notice how culture reproduces itself: not through slogans, but through what children are told counts as normal.