"Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell"
About this Quote
Wilder’s frontier moralism lands with the plain force of a washboard: work isn’t just a way to survive, it’s a way to stay legible to yourself. “Every job is good” isn’t starry-eyed egalitarianism so much as a hard-edged claim about dignity being earned in motion, not granted by status. On the prairie, the hierarchy that mattered was competence. If you could mend, plant, haul, teach, cook, you belonged. If you couldn’t, you were a risk.
The second line sharpens into something almost Mencken-ish in its contempt for spectators. “A man who works hard stinks” is literal - sweat, animals, smoke - but it’s also social odor: the mark of labor that polite society likes to romanticize from a safe distance. Wilder flips the insult back onto the accuser. The people offended by the smell aren’t refined; they’re idle. They have the luxury to be disgusted. Their “nothing to do but smell” paints leisure as a kind of moral vacancy, a life so underused it turns judgmental.
It’s also a quiet defense against class shame. Wilder grew up in a culture where poverty could feel like personal failure and where women’s work was constant and undervalued. The quote preemptively reframes embarrassment (you smell, your hands are rough, your job is small) as evidence of contribution. In that sense, it’s not just advice. It’s armor: a way to make labor, in all its mess, into a source of pride and a rebuke to those who confuse cleanliness with worth.
The second line sharpens into something almost Mencken-ish in its contempt for spectators. “A man who works hard stinks” is literal - sweat, animals, smoke - but it’s also social odor: the mark of labor that polite society likes to romanticize from a safe distance. Wilder flips the insult back onto the accuser. The people offended by the smell aren’t refined; they’re idle. They have the luxury to be disgusted. Their “nothing to do but smell” paints leisure as a kind of moral vacancy, a life so underused it turns judgmental.
It’s also a quiet defense against class shame. Wilder grew up in a culture where poverty could feel like personal failure and where women’s work was constant and undervalued. The quote preemptively reframes embarrassment (you smell, your hands are rough, your job is small) as evidence of contribution. In that sense, it’s not just advice. It’s armor: a way to make labor, in all its mess, into a source of pride and a rebuke to those who confuse cleanliness with worth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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