Parenting & Family Quote by Jackie Kennedy

The line lands like a polite jab delivered in pearls: elegant, domesticated, and quietly incendiary. Jackie Kennedy frames the postwar ideal of womanhood as a kind of gilded containment, where the reward for doing everything "right" is a slow, atmospheric loneliness. That last image - raindrops tracking down a windowpane - isn’t just sadness; it’s enforced passivity made visual. A life reduced to watching time happen.

Her intent isn’t to scold individual choices, but to name a structural trap that polite society pretended wasn’t there. "Women of my generation" is doing diplomatic work: it signals solidarity rather than exception. Kennedy, famously positioned as the emblem of tasteful domesticity, uses her authority as a cultural symbol to puncture the myth that staying home automatically equals fulfillment. Coming from someone whose public job was literally to model a certain kind of American woman, the critique carries extra voltage.

The subtext is also about purpose and identity beyond caretaking. "Weren’t supposed to work" points to social permission, not personal desire: the problem is less capability than prohibition. When she asks what happens after the children are grown, she’s highlighting the cruel math of a life plan with an expiration date. In that era, men’s identities kept accruing; women’s were expected to conclude.

Context matters: Kennedy lived at the hinge of second-wave feminism, close enough to its pressure to feel the cracks, constrained enough to speak in metaphor rather than manifesto. The windowpane is a cage you can still see through.