Parenting & Family Quote by Ernestine Rose

There is a quiet sting in Rose's phrasing: fathers want the end product, not the work. She frames paternal affection as conditional on a child's easy pleasantness "good-natured, well-behaved, and comfortable" a trio that sounds less like a description of personhood than of household management. The words carry the domestic fantasy of the 19th-century middle-class home, where children are expected to be proof of moral order rather than messy, growing humans.

Rose's real target is the convenient male posture of authority without intimacy. "Out of their philosophy" is a sly insult: not that fathers are cruel, but that they treat care as beneath their intellectual scope. Philosophy here isn't wisdom; it's a self-excusing worldview that lets men claim the dignity of providers and disciplinarians while outsourcing the daily labor of shaping temperament, teaching regulation, and creating "comfort" to women. The subtext is feminist and tactical: if men claim leadership in the family (and, by extension, the polity), they can't also claim incompetence in the emotional and practical duties that make families functional.

As an activist in an era when women's public voice was policed and motherhood was idealized, Rose flips the script. She doesn't romanticize maternal sacrifice; she exposes paternal entitlement. The line works because it refuses melodrama and opts for a brisk diagnosis, using the language of preference ("like to have") to show how easily love becomes consumer demand. It reads like a warning: a society that trains men to desire obedience will end up raising children to perform it, not to become it.