Politics & Power Quote by Anna Howard Shaw

A trap disguised as a truism, Shaw's line forces her audience to stop hiding behind procedural fog and admit what they're really defending. "Now one of two things is true" isn't philosophical modesty; it's a rhetorical cornering. In an era when opponents of women's suffrage loved to argue technicalities (states' rights, tradition, "separate spheres"), Shaw collapses the debate into a moral binary: either you believe in a republic as an idea, or you don't. No comfortable middle ground where you can praise democracy in speeches and then quietly restrict it in practice.

The brilliance is in the bait-and-switch. The opening sounds like calm logic, almost courtroom neutral. Then "a republic" arrives carrying all the founding mythology Americans claim to cherish: consent of the governed, legitimacy through participation, government as a public trust rather than a private club. Shaw's subtext is accusatory without being shrill: if you deny half the population political voice, you're not protecting the republic, you're refuting it. You're treating "republic" as branding rather than commitment.

Context matters: Shaw was speaking as a suffrage leader when the movement was battling both overt misogyny and respectable hypocrisy. The line is built to make that hypocrisy socially expensive. It doesn't ask for sympathy; it demands consistency. It's activist rhetoric at its most effective: not soaring poetry, but a clean, sharp test of principles that leaves the audience either agreeing to expansion of democracy or confessing they never really wanted it.