Daily Inspiration Quote by Edna Ferber

Ferber’s line is a scalpel slipped under the satin: it cuts open the way respectability gets staged as performance, especially for women. “Moral and exciting” reads like an impossible double-booking in the cultural imagination of her era, when “good” women were meant to be calm, contained, and legible, while “exciting” implied appetite, risk, a loosened grip on propriety. The joke is that the only socially acceptable way to have both is to look like you’re suffering for it.

That “quite a struggle” is doing all the work. It’s not describing private virtue so much as public choreography: the visible strain that reassures onlookers you didn’t want pleasure too much. Ferber is skewering the demand for women to advertise internal conflict as proof of character. Enjoyment alone is suspicious; enjoyment with guilt becomes respectable. You can be alluring, but only if you appear to be resisting your own allure.

The subtext is less about individual morality than about an audience trained to reward self-denial. In a culture where women’s desirability is constantly appraised, the “struggle” becomes a costume - a way to launder sexuality through virtue signaling. Ferber, a novelist attuned to social scripts and the economics of reputation, is also winking at how class and performance intersect: looking like you wrestled with temptation suggests you had options, standards, something to lose.

Written from the vantage point of early-to-mid 20th-century America, the line lands as both critique and survival note: the tightrope isn’t natural; it’s engineered, and women are expected to make the balancing act look like integrity.