Politics & Power Quote by Judith Guest

A line like this pretends to be simple family trivia, but it’s really a pressure point. “Ours” plants the flag of collective identity: not just I, but we, a whole domestic unit with its own unwritten constitution. The phrase “not a political household” doesn’t merely describe an absence of party talk; it signals a worldview in which politics is treated as contamination, something that belongs outside the clean perimeter of home. That’s a choice, and the sentence quietly admits it.

The subtext is classed and generational. In many mid-century American homes, especially those invested in respectability, “political” could mean impolite, radical, argumentative, or simply inconvenient. Calling the household “not political” is a way to claim neutrality while still benefiting from the status quo. It’s also a subtle indicator of who gets to afford disengagement. Opting out is easiest when the stakes don’t feel immediate.

Guest’s novelist sensibility shows in the calibration: “when I was growing up” adds a soft caveat, opening space for change, regret, or reappraisal. It hints that the speaker now recognizes politics was there all along - in gender roles, money rules, silence around conflict, what gets discussed at dinner and what’s swallowed.

The intent, then, isn’t to nostalgia-brag about civility. It’s to set up a character and a formative environment defined by avoidance. That avoidance becomes a kind of inheritance: if you’re raised to see politics as external noise, you also learn to mistrust your own anger, to translate public questions into private shame, and to confuse quiet with virtue.