Daily Inspiration Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

A line like this lands because it refuses both melodrama and denial. Clare Boothe Luce frames patriarchy as a sustained, deliberate pressure - "kept woman down" - then snaps the sentence into a counterpunch: "It has not knocked her out". The intent is neither polite reformism nor utopian optimism. It is a theatrical assertion of stamina, designed to stiffen the spine of an audience that has every reason to be tired.

The subtext is tactical. By conceding the force of "male supremacy" up front, Luce avoids the easy rebuttal that women are merely impatient or ungrateful. She names the system, not individual villains. Then she shifts the register from sociology to the ring. "Knocked her out" borrows the language of combat sports: there is an opponent, there are rounds, there is damage, but there is also the possibility of rising before the count. That metaphor subtly recasts women not as victims awaiting rescue but as contenders still in the fight. It's also a warning to men who imagine history as settled. The match is ongoing.

Context matters: Luce was a prominent playwright and public figure moving through elite political and media circles in a century when women gained the vote, entered wartime labor, then were pushed back toward domesticity. Her wit is calibrated for that backlash: a cool refusal to accept "progress" as linear, paired with an equally cool refusal to accept defeat. The rhetoric works because it's unsentimental. It grants the injury, denies the knockout, and turns endurance into a form of power.