"On the contrary, woman is the best equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle"
About this Quote
A poet calling woman a "fighting machine" is doing a deliberately jarring bit of rhetorical cross-wiring: he splices Victorian-era lyric idealization to the harsh, metallic vocabulary of modern war. The phrase is half compliment, half provocation. "On the contrary" signals he is entering an argument already in motion, pushing back against a default assumption of female fragility or domestic destiny. Instead of defending women by making them more "gentle", he defends them by making them more formidable.
The machine metaphor matters. It strips away the sentimental framing that often infantilized women, replacing it with a language usually reserved for men, armies, and industry. Yet it also courts a danger: calling anyone a machine risks flattening their interior life into pure function. That tension is the subtext. Le Gallienne wants the shock of recognition - women endure, adapt, and persist under pressures society barely names - but he borrows a metaphor that hints at how that endurance is demanded, engineered, and exploited.
The context is a turn-of-the-century culture negotiating suffrage, shifting labor roles, and the mass violence of the early 20th century. Even before women could reliably claim public authority, they were expected to absorb private wars: childbirth, economic precarity, moral scrutiny, and the emotional logistics of keeping families afloat. By recasting that stamina as battle-readiness, the line smuggles a feminist reversal into a familiar heroic register. It works because it refuses to ask politely. It dares the reader to admit what they already know and have been trained not to say: that "strength" has never been exclusively male, only officially recognized that way.
The machine metaphor matters. It strips away the sentimental framing that often infantilized women, replacing it with a language usually reserved for men, armies, and industry. Yet it also courts a danger: calling anyone a machine risks flattening their interior life into pure function. That tension is the subtext. Le Gallienne wants the shock of recognition - women endure, adapt, and persist under pressures society barely names - but he borrows a metaphor that hints at how that endurance is demanded, engineered, and exploited.
The context is a turn-of-the-century culture negotiating suffrage, shifting labor roles, and the mass violence of the early 20th century. Even before women could reliably claim public authority, they were expected to absorb private wars: childbirth, economic precarity, moral scrutiny, and the emotional logistics of keeping families afloat. By recasting that stamina as battle-readiness, the line smuggles a feminist reversal into a familiar heroic register. It works because it refuses to ask politely. It dares the reader to admit what they already know and have been trained not to say: that "strength" has never been exclusively male, only officially recognized that way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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