Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Le Gallienne

A poet of the fin-de-siecle watching gender roles loosen, Le Gallienne frames equality not as a grim moral correction but as a practical upgrade to living. The key move is his insistence on "comrades": a word with socialist warmth and battlefield grit, importing the language of shared risk into the domestic and social sphere. He's not praising women for becoming "like men" or men for "allowing" women in; he's pitching a new social contract where intimacy is built on partnership rather than performance.

The sentence balances on two mirrored arenas, "work" and "play", as if to say modern life is finally admitting what older norms tried to keep separate: that power and pleasure follow the same rules. If women can be colleagues, they can also be friends; if men can be friends, they can be less like wardens. That is the subtext: companionship is being rehabilitated from a threatening idea (to patriarchy, to romance-as-hierarchy) into a civilizing one.

Then comes the sly reassurance: "the fun of life seems in no wise diminished". He's anticipating backlash from those who imagine gender equality as the end of flirtation, mystery, or charm. Instead, he suggests the opposite: the so-called "battle of the sexes" was never the engine of delight it claimed to be, just a socially sanctioned strain. In early 20th-century terms, this is pro-modernity propaganda with a smile: progress, he implies, is not only right; it's more enjoyable.