"What has the women's movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for vice president? Never get married"
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Steinem’s line lands like a rimshot: it takes a historic breakthrough and yanks the spotlight onto the trapdoor beneath it. Geraldine Ferraro’s 1984 vice-presidential run was supposed to be proof of progress; Steinem reframes it as a case study in how quickly “firsts” become punishment. The joke works because it’s not really about matrimony. It’s about the cultural contract women are forced to sign: public ambition is tolerated only if your private life stays perfectly legible, domesticated, and scandal-free.
Ferraro was hounded over her husband John Zaccaro’s finances and business dealings in a way that made her campaign feel like a referendum on someone else’s résumé. Steinem’s punchline, “Never get married,” is strategic exaggeration. It exposes the asymmetry: male candidates routinely benefit from the aura of “family man,” while a woman’s marriage can be weaponized as evidence of compromised independence, divided loyalties, or ethical contamination-by-proximity. The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: the system will treat your intimacy as public property, then blame you for having it.
As an activist and intellectual satirist, Steinem is also policing the movement’s own expectations. Feminism can celebrate symbolic victories, but symbols don’t shield you from institutional sexism; sometimes they invite it. The line is funny because it’s absurd. It stings because it wasn’t. In one sentence, Steinem names the price of access: a woman can enter the room, but she may have to leave her ordinary life at the door.
Ferraro was hounded over her husband John Zaccaro’s finances and business dealings in a way that made her campaign feel like a referendum on someone else’s résumé. Steinem’s punchline, “Never get married,” is strategic exaggeration. It exposes the asymmetry: male candidates routinely benefit from the aura of “family man,” while a woman’s marriage can be weaponized as evidence of compromised independence, divided loyalties, or ethical contamination-by-proximity. The subtext is bleakly pragmatic: the system will treat your intimacy as public property, then blame you for having it.
As an activist and intellectual satirist, Steinem is also policing the movement’s own expectations. Feminism can celebrate symbolic victories, but symbols don’t shield you from institutional sexism; sometimes they invite it. The line is funny because it’s absurd. It stings because it wasn’t. In one sentence, Steinem names the price of access: a woman can enter the room, but she may have to leave her ordinary life at the door.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marriage |
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