"The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: It's a girl"
About this Quote
A birth announcement is framed as biology, but Chisholm treats it as policy: four words that quietly draft a life’s expectations. The line works because it compresses an entire social system into a supposedly neutral moment. “It’s a girl” sounds like simple information, yet Chisholm hears a starter pistol for conditioning, the instant a body gets translated into a script: how to behave, what to desire, what to fear, what to settle for.
Her triad - emotional, sexual, psychological - is deliberately totalizing. She’s not arguing that sexism shows up later in hiring or paychecks; she’s arguing those downstream injustices are preloaded in the earliest story we tell about a person. “Stereotyping” is a clinical, almost bureaucratic word, and that’s the point: the harm isn’t only crude prejudice, it’s standard operating procedure, administered with a smile and a ribbon. Even the doctor matters. Authority blesses the category, and the category immediately starts doing social work.
In Chisholm’s political context - a Black woman navigating the thickest glass ceilings of American power, and a leading voice in 1970s feminism - the quote doubles as a critique of institutions that pretend to be objective. Medicine, family rituals, school, media: each claims to merely “reflect reality” while actively manufacturing it.
The subtext is a warning to reformers: don’t just chase equal outcomes; interrogate the origin story. If the first label arrives as fate, inequality will always feel natural. Chisholm’s genius is making that “natural” moment sound, suddenly, like a rigged beginning.
Her triad - emotional, sexual, psychological - is deliberately totalizing. She’s not arguing that sexism shows up later in hiring or paychecks; she’s arguing those downstream injustices are preloaded in the earliest story we tell about a person. “Stereotyping” is a clinical, almost bureaucratic word, and that’s the point: the harm isn’t only crude prejudice, it’s standard operating procedure, administered with a smile and a ribbon. Even the doctor matters. Authority blesses the category, and the category immediately starts doing social work.
In Chisholm’s political context - a Black woman navigating the thickest glass ceilings of American power, and a leading voice in 1970s feminism - the quote doubles as a critique of institutions that pretend to be objective. Medicine, family rituals, school, media: each claims to merely “reflect reality” while actively manufacturing it.
The subtext is a warning to reformers: don’t just chase equal outcomes; interrogate the origin story. If the first label arrives as fate, inequality will always feel natural. Chisholm’s genius is making that “natural” moment sound, suddenly, like a rigged beginning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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