Politics & Power Quote by Edna O'Brien

A slap across the polite face of liberal progress: if the ballot is the gold standard of citizenship, O'Brien is saying it buys women nothing at the point of contact. The line works because it yanks “rights” out of the realm of ceremony and drops them into the realm of leverage. Voting is slow, institutional, and easily ignored; being armed is immediate, bodily, and hard to patronize. It’s not just provocation for its own sake. It’s an accusation that the state’s promises to women have historically been conditional, revocable, and enforced (when they are enforced at all) by systems built to protect male power.

The subtext is grimly pragmatic: if violence is already the background condition of women’s lives - domestic abuse, coercion, the threat that governs public space - then demanding women remain defenseless is not neutrality, it’s policy. “The vote means nothing” isn’t anti-democratic so much as anti-naive, a refusal to confuse symbolic inclusion with real security. The second sentence detonates the first: you can’t celebrate enfranchisement while leaving women structurally vulnerable.

Context matters. O'Brien, an Irish novelist who spent a career writing against sexual repression, Church authority, and national myths of purity, knows how “respectability” disciplines women into silence. Her fiction is full of bodies treated as property and desire treated as evidence. Read that way, “We should be armed” is less a call to literal militancy than a demand for credible power - legal, economic, social, physical - the kind that makes consequences unavoidable. It’s the bitter wisdom of someone who’s watched “progress” arrive with applause and leave women alone with the aftermath.