War & Peace Quote by Janet Flanner

Flanner drops a genteel oath - "By jove" - like a lace handkerchief over a line that’s actually a blade. The sentence starts in the register of old-world inevitability ("no wonder... as a rule"), echoing the patronizing common sense of her era: women don’t love war, don’t understand it, can’t operate in it. Then she flips the moral weight of the claim in the final clause, where the real target appears: war isn’t an instinct men naturally manage; it’s an invention men force each other to endure.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, she’s repeating the gendered logic used to keep women out of combat and decision-making. Underneath, she’s exposing the grotesque circularity of masculine authority: men monopolize war-making, then cite women’s lack of proximity as proof of women’s inadequacy. Her punchline - "it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented" - is less compliment than indictment. It frames masculinity not as bravery but as compulsory participation in a machine built by other men, often at a distance: generals, statesmen, ideologues.

Context matters: Flanner reported across interwar Europe and the Second World War, steeped in the spectacle of male political ego metastasizing into mass death. Read that way, the line doesn’t romanticize male endurance; it sketches a closed system where men manufacture catastrophe and then crown themselves experts because they can survive it. Women’s distance becomes not weakness, but a refusal - or exclusion - from the self-justifying logic of slaughter.