Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mary MacLane

A small masterpiece of scandal-management, this line turns moral panic into a weaponized wince. Mary MacLane doesn’t deny the charge that her work has unsettled young women; she stages a performance of tenderness about it. “It is with pain” is doing double duty: it sounds like contrition, but it also signals that the reader should look at the accusers with suspicion. If the alleged harm is “dire,” why does the sentence feel so controlled, so faintly amused? Because the real target isn’t the girls, it’s the culture that treats female interior life as a contagion.

MacLane came up in an era when women’s writing was policed not just for obscenity, but for emotional and existential audacity. Her notoriety (especially after The Story of Mary MacLane) rested on a public craving to watch a woman confess too much, then be punished for it. In that environment, the phrase “minds of young girls” is a pressure point: “minds” implies thought as a vulnerable organ, easily bruised; “young girls” cues the protective reflex of parents, clergy, and editors who want women impressionable, not imaginative.

The sentence is also a sly inversion of responsibility. She frames herself as the one suffering, not the supposedly endangered readers. That rhetorical pivot exposes the melodrama of censorship: society claims to defend girls while actually defending a hierarchy where female desire, ambition, and self-regard must stay unarticulated. MacLane’s “pain” reads as polite irony - a feminine-coded softness that smuggles in defiance.