Life & Wisdom Quote by Frank O'Connor

O'Connor lands the line like a barbed aside overheard at a dinner table: half social observation, half provocation. The snap comes from the reversal. You expect "anti-feminist" to attach to men policing women; instead, he points to a "really feminine woman" as the most reliable enforcer. It's not a compliment to femininity so much as a diagnosis of how power protects itself by ventriloquizing through its apparent opposite.

The subtext is about policing borders. "Really feminine" isn't a neutral description; it's a credential, a performance that wins social rewards in a system that prizes certain forms of womanhood. From that position, feminism can look less like liberation than like a threat to scarcity: if the rules change, the status of the woman who has mastered the old rules becomes less valuable. O'Connor is also taking aim at a familiar cultural pattern: the gatekeeper who insists the gate is natural. When someone has built an identity around being desired, protected, or morally elevated by traditional gender roles, feminism reads as an attempt to cancel the very currency she's been paid in.

Context matters: O'Connor wrote out of a mid-century Ireland and Britain where Catholic morality, respectability, and rigid gender scripts were not abstract debates but daily infrastructure. His fiction often shows ordinary people trapped in institutions they didn't design, then fiercely defending them anyway. The line's sting is its cynicism about complicity: patriarchy doesn't just have architects; it has decorators, beneficiaries, and volunteers.