Politics & Power Quote by Florence E. Allen

Allen is warning against a lazy kind of scorekeeping: tally a few prominent women in office, study their votes, then declare the “women’s effect” on politics solved. Coming from a pioneering judge who lived through suffrage, early waves of women entering public life, and the long slog of institutional exclusion, the line reads like a rebuke to tokenism before the term was fashionable.

The intent is methodological and political at once. Methodological, because she’s pushing back on the idea that representation can be measured like a lab result drawn from a tiny sample size. Political, because she’s challenging a convenient narrative that judges women’s civic power only when it’s packaged in a handful of visible officeholders. That framing lets the broader system off the hook: if a few women in office don’t “transform” politics, critics can argue the project was overhyped, or that women simply govern like men. Allen’s point is that politics is a climate, not just a roll call.

The subtext is also a warning to allies. Don’t romanticize “women in office” as a single bloc with a shared agenda; individual women operate under party discipline, institutional norms, and career incentives that often reward conformity. The deeper effect Allen gestures toward is diffuse: shifts in what issues get legitimacy, who gets heard, what behavior is tolerated, what legal and bureaucratic assumptions quietly change. She’s arguing for a wider lens - one that sees gender’s political impact in networks, norms, and access, not just in the headline-making actions of a few trailblazers.