Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Steele

Steele’s line is a compliment wrapped in a leash: it flatters women for candor while presuming they can only afford it in the margins. The postscript is where the letter drops its formal costume. It’s the “one more thing” that arrives after the performance of propriety, when the social script has already been obeyed and the ink is supposedly drying. Steele turns that structural quirk into a gendered thesis: a woman’s “mind” is present, but it must be smuggled in under cover of an afterthought.

The intent isn’t simply to observe a habit of correspondence; it’s to preserve the era’s etiquette by making female frankness seem accidental rather than authoritative. A postscript is technically extra, and that “extra” status does ideological work: it keeps women’s real opinions labeled as add-ons, not arguments. The subtext is less “women are witty” than “women must be careful.” If the main body of the letter is a room with chaperones, the P.S. is the doorstep, where you can whisper.

Context matters. Steele, co-founder of The Tatler and a key voice in early 18th-century periodical culture, wrote in a world obsessed with manners, reputation, and the management of public/private selves. Letter-writing was one of the few socially sanctioned arenas for women’s self-expression, yet it was policed by expectations of modesty and deference. The joke lands because the audience already “knows” the rule: women speak indirectly. Steele’s wit depends on that constraint, and by making it sound like charming inevitability, he helps keep it in place.