Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Cavendish

The sting of Cavendish's line is how politely it detonates. "As for my brothers" opens like a dutiful family mention, then she swerves into something bordering on scandal: "I know not how they were bred". In a culture obsessed with bloodlines, inheritance, and the grooming of sons for public life, to plead ignorance about your brothers' "breeding" is to expose the entire apparatus as both opaque and arbitrary. The word does double duty: it can mean upbringing and education, but it also carries the animal register of reproduction. Cavendish lets that ambiguity sit there, a genteel insult that reads like a raised eyebrow.

The intent isn't just to mock her siblings; it's to mark her distance from the masculine pipeline that supposedly produces competence. Her brothers are the ones society invests in, the ones presumed "made" for the world. Cavendish, repeatedly treated as an oddity for writing at all, flips the hierarchy: if their formation is so important, why does it look so accidental from the inside of the household? The subtext is: your systems for producing men of consequence are neither transparent nor impressive.

Context matters. Cavendish wrote from the precarious position of a woman in the 17th century angling for intellectual legitimacy while being dismissed as eccentric, even monstrous. This small, dry sentence works because it weaponizes modesty. She claims not to know, not to judge, not to pry; the insinuation does the judging for her. It's a quiet act of authorship as social critique: the family, like the state, trains its heirs in secret and calls the result "nature". Cavendish refuses the myth.