Politics & Power Quote by Susan Griffin

Griffin’s line is doing something bracing: it refuses to treat “femininity” as a personal style choice and recasts it as a discipline enforced under unequal power. The deliberately jarring comparison to slavery isn’t meant to equate experiences wholesale; it’s a rhetorical shove that exposes a shared mechanism of domination: the powerful don’t just control labor or rights, they attempt to control self-understanding. The master’s “image” becomes a script the oppressed must perform to survive. Griffin’s point is that gender works similarly when political and economic leverage sits elsewhere.

The phrase “implicit force” is the tell. She’s describing coercion that rarely needs a police baton. It operates through dependency (jobs, marriage, safety), reward systems (approval, protection, desirability), and the omnipresent threat of punishment (ridicule, exclusion, violence). In that world, conformity isn’t vanity; it’s risk management. “Culture’s image of what is female” names a manufactured ideal that pretends to be natural, which is why it’s so effective: if the standard feels like biology, resisting it looks like deviance rather than dissent.

Context matters: Griffin is writing from the late-20th-century feminist moment that zeroed in on how power hides in the “normal” - in beauty codes, domestic roles, sexual scripts, even language. Her intent is to shift the debate from individual women’s choices to the structure that makes certain choices feel mandatory. The subtext is accusatory but strategic: if femininity is partly an imposed performance, liberation requires not better performances but different terms of life.