Politics & Power Quote by Sara Paretsky

A single sentence, and Paretsky has already lit the fuse on a familiar American contradiction: politics that sound emancipatory in public, expectations that stay stubbornly domestic in private. The small pivot - "but even they" - is the tell. It’s not a sweeping attack on conservatives or tradition; it’s a sharper indictment of self-congratulatory progressivism that assumes its ideals automatically trickle down into daily life.

The line works because it refuses melodrama. "Liberal intellectuals" carries cultural cachet: people who read the right books, vote the right way, speak fluent equality. Then Paretsky undercuts that brand with the mundane machinery of gendered labor: childcare, housework, the unspoken assumption that a daughter’s time is elastic and available. The subtext is that ideology is cheap when it isn’t tested at home, where power lives in routines, not slogans.

There’s also a quiet class-and-generation context embedded here. Postwar middle-class families could afford to romanticize "the life of the mind" while still relying on invisible household management. Girls were often drafted into that management as unpaid staff, even when the adults in charge imagined themselves as enlightened. Paretsky isn’t only recalling a childhood slight; she’s explaining an origin story for a writer who made a career (especially in crime fiction) out of noticing what polite society prefers to call normal. The real target is hypocrisy with good taste: the kind that never raises its voice, because it never has to.