Time & Perspective Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis lands the line with a sly, almost offhanded confidence that’s doing more work than it admits. “Long before history began” is mock-epic throat-clearing: he inflates the stage to prehistoric scale, then immediately collapses it into something bluntly practical. Men “got together apart from the women and done things.” Not “built civilizations” or “discovered fire,” just “done things” - the vague verb that smuggles in conquest, invention, rule-making, and the self-congratulating myth of male progress without having to defend any particular achievement.

The kicker is the last sentence: “We had time.” It reads like a shrug, but it’s the argument. Male dominance is framed not as superior virtue but as a scheduling advantage: a division of labor where women’s time is consumed by reproduction, childrearing, and domestic survival, while men get surplus hours to form clubs, institutions, traditions - and then call the resulting record “history.” Lewis isn’t merely praising male enterprise; he’s winking at how much of what passes for “male greatness” depends on an economy of hidden, gendered work.

Context matters. Lewis wrote in a Britain where “separate spheres” was still a cultural default, even as women’s public roles were expanding after suffrage and wartime mobilization. The line can be read as an explanatory dig at modern feminism, but it also inadvertently exposes patriarchy’s quietest trick: presenting accumulated access and leisure as natural merit. The humor is barbed because it risks turning structural inequality into lads’ banter - and that tension is precisely why it sticks.