Daily Inspiration Quote by Bella Abzug

Abzug lands the punch with a bureaucrat's favorite weapon: the word "test". It drags sexism out of the realm of taste, tradition, and "nature" and into the language of hiring memos and civil-rights law, where it can be challenged, audited, and overturned. By framing employment as something evaluated by a standard, she exposes how gender discrimination hides behind the fiction of meritocracy. If a job has requirements, spell them out. If the requirement is sex, admit you're not evaluating competence at all - you're enforcing a social caste system.

The line's subtext is almost prosecutorial. "Arrangement of your chromosomes" is deliberately clinical, a cool, slightly absurd phrase that makes the prejudice sound as crude as it is. She refuses to debate femininity, motherhood, or "roles" on their own terms; she reduces the argument to its bare biology and then asks why biology should be an employment credential. That move is strategic: it undercuts the soft-focus rationalizations ("women aren't suited", "men are providers") by translating them into a blunt, legally legible category distinction.

Context matters. Abzug was a New York congresswoman and a key feminist legislator in the early 1970s, when fights over Title VII enforcement, the Equal Rights Amendment, and workplace rights were intensifying. Her background as a lawyer shows in the precision: it's not a poetic plea for fairness, it's an argument about standards, evidence, and legitimacy. The real target isn't just individual bias; it's institutional gatekeeping that pretends to be neutral while treating sex as destiny.