Wit & Attitude Quote by George Eliot

A backhanded compliment with a blade tucked inside it: Eliot lets a speaker flirt with misogyny, then forces him into a theological corner where his certainty collapses. The opening clause, in colloquial dialect, performs the casual cruelty of “common sense” sexism - the kind that presents itself as plainspoken truth. Then comes the pivot: “God Almighty made ’em to match the men.” If women are “foolish,” the line implies, what does that make the men they’re fitted to? The joke is not just at women’s expense; it ricochets back onto male self-regard.

That ricochet is Eliot’s signature move. Writing as a woman under a male pen name in a culture that treated women’s intellect as a problem to be managed, she understood how prejudice often hides inside genial humor. The sentence mimics a pub-room proverb, but it’s engineered like a trap. It borrows the authority of religion - “God Almighty” - only to reveal how flimsy that authority becomes when used to justify social hierarchy. Divine design doesn’t elevate men; it levels them.

The dialect matters, too. Eliot often routes big moral arguments through ordinary voices, showing how ideology lives in idioms, not manifestos. The speaker thinks he’s being magnanimous: women may be silly, but they’re a perfect fit. Eliot lets us hear the condescension, then makes the “match” sting, exposing a marriage-market logic where compatibility is measured by mutual limitation. It’s satire without sparkling one-liners: a dry, provincial joke that quietly indicts the whole room.