Marriage Quote by Barbara Cartland

Cartland packages submission as marital wisdom with the breezy certainty of someone who made a career selling romance. The line works because it pretends to diagnose a problem ("selfish" female self-inquiry) while quietly redefining virtue as silence: stop checking in with yourself, stop comparing notes with other women, and redirect all effort toward pleasing a husband. That isn’t advice; it’s social control dressed up as etiquette.

The sharpest tell is the pairing of "Am I good?" with "Am I satisfied?" One is moral, the other visceral. By labeling both "extremely selfish", Cartland collapses a woman’s ethical self-assessment and her emotional or sexual needs into the same sin: selfhood. The prescription is equally telling. "The less women... talk to other women" reads like an anti-union tactic for the domestic sphere, discouraging the very conversations where patterns of neglect, coercion, or inequity become visible. Keep the wives isolated, and each one can be convinced her discontent is a personal failing, not a structural one.

Context matters: Cartland wrote in a Britain that prized respectability, with mid-century gender norms that treated marriage as a woman’s primary project and a man’s comfort as the household’s organizing principle. As a novelist of idealized courtship, she also had a brand incentive to keep the fantasy intact: happiness is achievable if women simply perform it correctly. The subtext is bleakly efficient: harmony is not negotiated; it is maintained by women shrinking themselves until there’s no conflict left to name.