Marriage Quote by Thomas Fuller

A neat piece of domestic propaganda disguised as practical advice, Fuller compresses an entire 17th-century moral order into one sentence. The line flatters itself as common sense: don’t gamble on mystery; marry the woman whose character has already been “proven” in the most visible apprenticeship available to her - daughterhood. It’s a cleric’s version of due diligence, and it smuggles theology into matchmaking.

The intent is disciplinary as much as it is advisory. “Good daughter” doesn’t mean affectionate in the modern, Instagrammable sense; it implies obedience, deference, sexual propriety, and competence in a household structured by patriarchal authority. The subtext is blunt: the best predictor of a “good wife” is how well she has practiced submission under her father. Virtue is framed less as inner conscience than as a track record of compliance.

Context matters. Fuller writes in a period when marriage is economic infrastructure, not self-actualization. Household order is social order; the family is a small church, and the husband is the local magistrate of manners. So the quote works rhetorically by collapsing two roles into a single continuum, as if a woman’s life is meant to be one long transfer of allegiance from one male head to another.

There’s a quiet anxiety underneath the certainty: wives are imagined as risks to be managed, and the safest woman is the one whose behavior has been legible to the community. It’s less romance than surveillance with vows.