Wit & Attitude Quote by Edmondo De Amicis

De Amicis’ line dresses itself up as gallantry while quietly insisting on male ignorance as a natural law. “A woman is always a mystery” isn’t just an observation; it’s a permission slip. If women are inherently unreadable, then misunderstanding them becomes inevitable rather than accountable. The phrase flatters the speaker’s caution and frames suspicion as wisdom: “one must not be fooled,” as if a woman’s face is a mask and her “heart’s inspiration” is a lure.

The subtext is a 19th-century anxiety about female interiority: women are credited with emotional force but denied transparent personhood. “Mystery” sounds admiring, but it’s a containment strategy. Turn a person into an enigma and you can stop listening for specific motives, grievances, or desires; you can treat her as a puzzle to be managed instead of a mind to be met. The line also betrays a fear of surfaces - beauty, expression, sincerity - as unreliable data, a very modern paranoia nested inside old-world romantic language.

Context matters: De Amicis wrote in post-unification Italy, a culture busy codifying national identity and social roles. Bourgeois respectability leaned heavily on gender scripts: men as rational citizens, women as emotional guardians of the private sphere. This aphorism reinforces that division while pretending to romanticize it. It’s “mystery” as ideology: an aesthetic veil over a warning label.