Daily Inspiration Quote by George Meredith

Meredith lands the sentence like a compliment and means it as an indictment. The Victorian ear can hear “civilized” as a benevolent mission statement: Man, agent of progress, patiently educating Woman. But Meredith’s phrasing flips that self-congratulating story into a bleak forecast. If “Woman” is “the last thing” to be civilized by “Man,” it’s because the civilizing project is less about enlightenment than control - and control is where male modernity keeps failing.

The line’s sting comes from its mock-grand, almost imperial cadence. “Civilized” is the keyword of 19th-century confidence: the same term used to justify empire, reformatories, and the policing of sexuality. Apply it to half the population and the hidden logic surfaces: women are treated as a territory to be managed, not a constituency to be heard. Meredith doesn’t ask whether women need civilizing; he exposes how men imagine they do, and how that fantasy becomes a permanent excuse for postponing equality. If the finish line keeps moving, it’s because the race is rigged.

Context matters: Meredith wrote in a period obsessed with “separate spheres,” the angel-in-the-house ideal, and the legal reality of coverture, where married women’s identities were absorbed into their husbands’. His novels repeatedly stage marriage as a battlefield of power dressed up as morality. The subtext here is bracingly modern: a society can industrialize, secularize, and congratulate itself on progress while still being primitive where it counts - in how it treats women.