"We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics"
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Naive, moralistic, blight: Millett stacks words her opponents used as insults and turns them into a confession that’s also a trap. “We are naive and moralistic women” reads like surrender, but it’s bait. Naivete becomes a refusal to accept political cruelty as normal; moralism becomes a demand that power answer to ethics. She’s not pleading for entry into politics on its terms. She’s indicting the terms.
The pivot is the bleak punch line: politics is “a blight upon the human condition,” yet the only way to cope with it is “through politics.” That contradiction is the engine of second-wave feminism: the private sphere can’t be kept pure because it’s already governed. Millett’s subtext is that withdrawal is not innocence; it’s compliance. If politics is a contamination, it’s one that has already seeped into the body - into sex, work, domestic labor, safety, and language itself. You don’t escape it by being “above” it. You just leave it to those who benefit.
Context sharpens the irony. Millett wrote and organized in the wake of Sexual Politics (1970), when feminist analysis was being dismissed as prudish, humorless, or hysterical while women were being told their oppression was personal maladjustment, not structure. Her line refuses that gaslighting. She acknowledges the exhaustion of political life - its ugliness, its compromises - and still insists on the only realistic strategy: meet power where it operates. The sentence ends without comfort because the point is not inspiration; it’s clarity.
The pivot is the bleak punch line: politics is “a blight upon the human condition,” yet the only way to cope with it is “through politics.” That contradiction is the engine of second-wave feminism: the private sphere can’t be kept pure because it’s already governed. Millett’s subtext is that withdrawal is not innocence; it’s compliance. If politics is a contamination, it’s one that has already seeped into the body - into sex, work, domestic labor, safety, and language itself. You don’t escape it by being “above” it. You just leave it to those who benefit.
Context sharpens the irony. Millett wrote and organized in the wake of Sexual Politics (1970), when feminist analysis was being dismissed as prudish, humorless, or hysterical while women were being told their oppression was personal maladjustment, not structure. Her line refuses that gaslighting. She acknowledges the exhaustion of political life - its ugliness, its compromises - and still insists on the only realistic strategy: meet power where it operates. The sentence ends without comfort because the point is not inspiration; it’s clarity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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