Wit & Attitude Quote by Helen Rowland

Rowland lands the punch with a stopwatch: twenty years of maternal labor vaporized in twenty minutes of erotic chaos. The line isn’t “anti-woman” so much as it’s skeptical about the sentimental pedestal culture builds for women. Motherhood is framed as civic work - slow, disciplined, identity-shaping. Romance is framed as pure volatility - fast, irrational, reputation-wrecking. The joke works because it flatters and indicts everyone at once: the mother for her supposed moral engineering, the “other woman” for her dangerous power, and the man for being the flimsy product of both.

The subtext is early 20th-century gender anxiety, packaged as a martini-dry quip. Rowland is writing in an era when women were publicly renegotiating power (suffrage, shifting courtship norms) while still being tasked with private responsibility for male character. So the mother “makes a man” because society outsourced male virtue to women; the man himself is curiously absent as an agent. Then comes the second woman, who doesn’t need institutions or time - only access - to expose how performative that “manhood” can be.

Rowland’s real target is the myth of stable masculinity. If manhood can be built like a cathedral yet toppled like a card house, maybe it was never granite. The cruelty is deliberate: it turns a cultural compliment (“a real man”) into a punchline about how easily the label slips.