Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Cavendish

Cavendish starts with what sounds like a plain logistical problem - she wasnt there to see the process - and then turns it into a quiet indictment of how knowledge gets gatekept. "They were bred when I was not capable to observe or before I was born" is an almost comic reminder that observation has limits: you cannot witness origins firsthand, and yet early modern natural philosophy often behaved as if it could speak with authority about generation, heredity, and sex. Her phrasing implies a skeptical posture toward the era's confident claims, especially the claims made by men who presume to narrate womens bodies.

The second clause sharpens the blade. "The breeding of men is of a different manner from that of women" reads, on the surface, like biological difference. Subtextually, it points to social manufacture: men and women are "bred" by custom, education, and power as much as by anatomy. Cavendish, a writer who moved in scientific circles without being fully admitted to them, is flagging a double standard in who gets to observe, record, and theorize. Men are produced (and authorized) through institutions; women are produced through constraint, modesty rules, and exclusion from learning.

Context matters: Cavendish wrote amid fierce debates over reproduction, often framed by male thinkers and filtered through religious and patriarchal assumptions. Her deliberately plain diction is a strategy. She refuses the ornate certainty of scholarly Latin culture and instead makes the epistemological point in domestic terms: if you couldnt see it, why pretend you know it - and why should womens "breeding" be explained without women present?