Life & Wisdom Quote by George William Curtis

Curtis packages a whole social order into a neat little proverb: romance as conquest, gender as destiny. The line isn’t trying to describe how people behave; it’s trying to authorize how they should. By invoking “Nature,” he pulls a classic rhetorical trick of the 19th century: laundering culture through biology. If “Nature makes” it so, then courtship norms, property laws, and the era’s tight constraints on women’s public lives start to look like inevitabilities rather than choices.

The verb pair does the heavy lifting. “Won” makes the woman an object, a prize with no verb of her own; “win” casts the man as the active agent whose identity is confirmed through pursuit. It’s a tidy grammar of power: men become themselves by taking; women become themselves by being taken. The subtext isn’t just about flirting; it’s about who gets to act in the world and who is acted upon. Even the romance gloss can’t hide how closely this maps onto the period’s broader script of separate spheres, where female virtue is framed as passive, protected, and possessed.

Curtis, a prominent man of letters in an America obsessed with “character” and respectability, is speaking from inside a culture that treated women’s autonomy as socially destabilizing. The sentence works because it flatters both sides: men get heroics, women get desirability. That’s also the trap. It turns inequality into compliment, recoding constraint as preference and coercion as courtship.