Politics & Power Quote by Dorothy Thompson

Thompson’s triple “why” lands like a desk-slam from someone who has watched Washington’s machinery up close and is no longer willing to pretend patience is a strategy. The line is built as an accusation disguised as a question: women have the formal instrument of citizenship, she argues, and they’ve proven they can organize and lobby, yet they’re spending that political capital on “all sorts of causes” instead of the “obvious needs” right in front of them. The implied target isn’t men in power so much as a kind of respectable female politics that has learned how to be useful to everyone except itself.

The subtext is thornier than a simple call for “vote your interests.” Thompson is pointing at a uniquely modern trap: the pressure to demonstrate seriousness by championing broad, often male-defined national agendas, while treating women’s material demands (workplace protections, childcare, equal pay, reproductive autonomy, safety) as parochial or impolite. “Their own causes” isn’t just policy; it’s permission to name women as a constituency with claims that don’t need moral laundering through a larger crusade.

Context matters: Thompson comes out of the interwar and postwar era when women’s suffrage was old news, women’s clubs were influential, and yet the political mainstream still treated gender equality as either already solved or dangerously radical. Her question exposes that complacency. It also flirts with a hard truth about coalition politics: you can be everywhere and still be absent from the rooms where your life is actually negotiated.