Aging & Wisdom Quote by Anna Garlin Spencer

The jab lands because it’s framed as “an old error,” a phrase that sounds almost quaint until you register what’s being called out: intellectual theft so routine it’s been naturalized as habit. Spencer isn’t merely asking for polite attribution. She’s exposing a gendered economy of ideas in which women’s thinking is treated as communal property, freely mined and quietly laundered through men’s names.

The quotation marks matter. They’re a tiny, almost fussy piece of punctuation, which is exactly the point: patriarchy doesn’t always announce itself with brute force; it operates through editorial norms, bylines, lecture circuits, and whose scholarship gets footnoted. Spencer’s wit turns that small mark into a moral instrument. If you have to “remember” to credit a woman, the culture has already trained you to forget.

Context sharpens the sting. Spencer wrote in an era when women were fighting for formal access to universities, professions, and political power, even as their labor - domestic, emotional, and intellectual - was routinely absorbed into institutions run by men. The line anticipates what we now call the “Matilda effect”: women’s contributions diminished, misattributed, or made invisible. By casting plagiarism as a social reflex rather than an individual lapse, Spencer shifts blame from a few bad actors to a system of recognition built to exclude.

It’s also a warning to the reader: if you’re offended, check whether you’re implicated. The joke is accusatory on purpose.