Politics & Power Quote by Anna Quindlen

A line like this lands with a thud because it inverts the expected villain. Public health threats are supposed to be faceless: viruses, opioids, pollution, maybe the healthcare system itself. Quindlen points instead to the most intimate setting, the home, and to the people society has trained women to treat as protectors. The shock is the point. It’s a journalistic provocation built to puncture the cultural story that danger is out there, in dark alleys and stranger encounters, not in kitchens and bedrooms.

The intent is blunt advocacy: reframe violence against women as a health issue, not a private “relationship problem” or a crime story that only matters when it turns sensational. By using the language of epidemiology - “greatest,” “public health threat” - she borrows the authority we grant to statistics and prevention campaigns. The subtext is that institutions often respond faster to pathogens than to patterns of male harm: intimate partner violence, coercive control, sexual assault, reproductive sabotage. It also implicates denial. Families, police, courts, and media routinely treat these harms as tragic exceptions rather than predictable outcomes of power imbalances.

Quindlen’s context as a columnist matters: she’s writing into an America where “family values” rhetoric often sanitized what families can do to women. The sentence is designed to be repeatable, quotable, and uncomfortable - a soundbite that forces a policy question. If the primary risk sits at home, then safety isn’t a matter of teaching women to be careful; it’s a matter of changing men’s behavior, funding shelters and counseling, tightening legal protections, and taking women’s testimony as data, not drama.