Fatherhood Quote by Enid Bagnold

Bagnold lands the punch with a parental paradox that feels both intimate and faintly accusatory: the father who “makes” his baby into “a little woman,” then “turns her back again” once she becomes one. The line works because it names a cultural sleight of hand so common it usually passes as tenderness. Fathers, in Bagnold’s telling, don’t just raise daughters; they curate them, shaping them into a version of femininity that is cute, safe, and controllable. “Little woman” is doing double duty: it’s affectionate, but it’s also miniature, a domesticated rehearsal of adulthood.

Then comes the recoil. When the daughter arrives at actual womanhood - sexual agency, independence, the power to refuse - he “turns her back again,” as if maturity were a wrong turn he can reverse. The subtext is less about individual cruelty than about a socially sanctioned kind of possession: men are encouraged to adore girls and distrust women, to celebrate innocence and police desire, to demand sophistication in theory and panic when it appears in their own home.

Bagnold wrote across an era when women’s roles were being renegotiated in public and in law, but the private theater of the family changed more slowly. The quote captures that lag. Its wit is in the calm inevitability of “always,” the way it frames this as a predictable cycle rather than a rare pathology. It’s not a shout; it’s a diagnosis, delivered with the cool precision of someone who has watched the same scene repeat for generations.