Politics & Power Quote by Anna Howard Shaw

The line lands like a slap because Shaw refuses the polite fiction that “advice” from politicians is neutral, wise, or even relevant. She frames the situation as a rigged moral absurdity: asking politicians to weigh in on women’s equality is like asking a fox to rule on a goose’s right to live. The metaphor is brutally efficient. It doesn’t accuse politicians of mere ignorance; it casts them as interested predators whose power depends on keeping others defenseless.

That’s the subtext doing its real work. Shaw isn’t bargaining for a kinder gatekeeper, she’s challenging the legitimacy of the gate. By turning the political class into a species with instincts, she strips away their self-appointed role as civilized arbiters and reveals a crude incentive structure underneath. The line also anticipates a familiar reformist trap: opponents demand “debate,” “compromise,” and “reasonable consultation” precisely to delay, dilute, or domesticate the claim. Shaw’s impatience reads as strategy, not temperament.

Context sharpens the bite. As a prominent American suffragist and former president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Shaw spent years watching legislatures treat women’s citizenship like a discretionary favor. Her quip is a protest against procedural paternalism: the idea that those who benefit from inequality should be the ones to certify its end. The goose-and-fox comparison makes a larger argument in miniature: rights aren’t granted by the comfortable after a thoughtful chat; they’re taken out of the hands of those who profit from denying them.