Politics & Power Quote by E. M. Forster

A compliment disguised as a slap, Forster’s line weaponizes domestic “influence” to expose how thin the era’s idea of political agency could be. On its face, it sounds like an ugly bit of marital bossiness: a wife should steer her husband’s vote. The sting is in the phrasing “ought to be ashamed,” which mimics the scolding moralism often aimed at women themselves. Forster flips that tone back on the household, where women were expected to do the social work of persuasion while being denied the public power of a ballot.

The subtext is that disenfranchisement doesn’t eliminate politics; it relocates it into private life. If women are barred from voting, the only sanctioned route to political impact becomes indirect pressure, charm, nagging, or “reason.” Forster’s provocation punctures the sentimental myth of the apolitical home. He implies that the home is already a voting booth by other means, and that the culture’s comfort with this arrangement is a kind of hypocrisy.

Context matters: Forster wrote in a Britain straining through suffrage battles and the broader churn of liberal reform. As a novelist attuned to manners and power, he understands how social systems survive by outsourcing authority to “influence” while keeping actual control elsewhere. The quote works because it’s not an argument; it’s a dare. It makes the polite arrangement sound grotesque enough to question, while also teasing an uncomfortable truth: even when women were excluded, men’s politics were still being negotiated across the dinner table.