Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Cavendish

Class anxiety rarely sounds this blunt, but Cavendish delivers it with the cool precision of someone defending a household border. She starts with a tactical concession: service itself is not shameful. “Many noble persons are forced to serve through necessity” nods to a world where civil war, inheritance, and misfortune could drop a gentlewoman into paid work. That sentence is a shield against charges of snobbery. Then she pivots, hard, to the real target: not servants as a class position, but “the vulgar sort” as a moral contagion.

The word “reserved” is doing social work here. It’s not merely emotional distance; it’s self-protection. Cavendish frames the household as an ecosystem where status is reproduced through behavior, and servants are the dangerous vectors. Her fear isn’t that servants will steal silver; it’s that they will quietly rewrite the children’s instincts. “Ill examples and worse counsel” makes upbringing sound less like schooling and more like infection, transmitted through proximity, speech, and everyday imitation.

The subtext is brutally modern: culture is sticky, and the wrong people are always too close. Cavendish, a woman navigating court life and reputation, is also defending female authority inside the home. By casting servants as “ill bred,” she elevates her own role as curator of manners and morals, insisting that class isn’t just birthright but a disciplined performance. Her prejudice is explicit, but so is her insight into how power maintains itself: not only by law or money, but by controlling the intimate theatre of childhood.