Faith & Spirit Quote by George Balanchine

Balanchine’s line lands like a compliment, but it’s the kind that arrives with strings attached. “Woman is first” sounds radical until you hear the fine print: men are “consorts,” a word that turns male dancers into accessories while quietly framing women as the object to be displayed, praised, and arranged. It’s chivalry with stage lighting. The rhetoric flatters women while preserving the choreographer’s authority to define what “woman” should look like in motion.

The phrasing is tellingly hierarchical. “God made men” invokes a cosmic job description: men exist to validate women. That doesn’t dismantle a gender order; it just flips who receives the adoration. The punchy escalation - “not equal... better” - pretends to be anti-sexist by rejecting equality as too small, while dodging the harder question of agency. Who gets to decide what “better” means, and at what cost to the dancers who have to embody it?

Context matters: Balanchine’s ballets famously center the ballerina as an idealized instrument, a precision machine for speed, line, and lightness. The male dancer often functions as a frame, a partner who makes her look inevitable. His “feminism” is aesthetic and theological, not political. It celebrates women as icons, not as workers with leverage. In the world of ballet - where power runs from choreographer to company to body - the quote reads less like empowerment than a manifesto for a particular kind of feminine supremacy: revered, elevated, and tightly controlled.