Parenting & Family Quote by Phyllis McGinley

McGinley needles at the polite fictions of mid-century gender etiquette by letting the sentence behave like a crowded train: cramped, jostling, full of elbows. The opening gesture - "A lady is smarter than a gentleman, maybe" - pretends to grant women an edge, then immediately shows how conditional that concession is. "Maybe" is the trapdoor. What follows is a catalog of socially approved competencies that sound like praise until you notice how each one is fenced in by domestic utility: sewing, childbirth, "intuition". Even the compliment is rigged to keep women in a narrow room.

The sharpest barb is the casual hierarchy smuggled into "intuition instead of her brain". It parodies the old myth that women possess a mysterious, lesser form of intelligence - felt, not reasoned - while men get to own the word "brain" outright. McGinley isn't endorsing the stereotype so much as ventriloquizing it, exaggerating its logic until it looks ridiculous.

Then the punchline: "but she can't fold a paper in a crowded train". It's wonderfully petty, and that's the point. The world that restricts women to "ladyhood" also denies them the basic physical freedoms of public space: room to spread out, to be clumsy, to take up air. A gentleman can fumble a newspaper because he's allowed to occupy the train. A lady must remain contained, decorative, unintrusive - her competence measured not by intellect but by how little inconvenience she causes.

McGinley, often read as a poet of domestic life, uses that very domestic lens to expose how small the cage is, and how often it's mistaken for a compliment.