Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Oliphant

A polite sentence with a knife in it. Oliphant frames her critique as something “everybody knows,” borrowing the cozy authority of common sense to smuggle in an indictment of common sense itself. The line is structured like advice, even a wink: men are easy to “satisfy,” and a woman need only “give her mind to it.” That last phrase is the sting. It implies concentration, labor, strategy - the mental work of managing male expectations. Satisfaction isn’t mutual pleasure or companionship; it’s an outcome women are tasked to engineer.

The word “gentlemen” does heavy lifting. It’s class-coded respectability, the kind that claims manners while quietly demanding entitlement. By calling them gentlemen, Oliphant exposes how patriarchy hides behind etiquette: the demand is small, the price is not. “Very little” reads as ironic understatement, because the “little” is really submission, performance, the narrowing of a life into an appeasement project.

Context matters: a Victorian novelist watching the era’s cult of domestic femininity harden into ideology. Women were expected to be the household’s emotional infrastructure, smoothing over male ego while pretending it was natural. Oliphant, who wrote professionally to support family, knew how “female duty” often meant unpaid work - or underpaid work - dressed up as virtue. The sentence doesn’t romanticize rebellion; it documents the everyday mechanics of accommodation, with the cool clarity of someone describing a rigged game everyone is trained not to name.