Life & Wisdom Quote by James Howell

A single strand of hair doing the work of a hundred oxen is Howell at his most wry: a proverb dressed up as an impossible physics problem, designed to make the reader smirk and then squirm. The line flatters women on the surface, but its real target is male self-control - or the lack of it. Oxen stand in for brute force, labor, and the public economy; the hair stands in for something private, intimate, and almost comically small. The joke is that power rarely belongs to what looks powerful.

Howell is writing in a 17th-century England where pamphlets, sermons, and courtly gossip all competed to define desire as either a moral hazard or a social instrument. His phrasing implies that attraction is not merely personal weakness; it is a kind of leverage that redirects work, attention, and resources. The “draw” is doing double duty: it’s literal pulling power and the gravitational pull of erotic fascination. That ambiguity is the engine.

There’s also a telling reduction at work. Woman becomes hair - not voice, mind, or agency, but a fetish object, detachable and portable, a token. The proverb praises feminine influence while shrinking it into an accessory men can blame. It’s less a hymn to women than a snapshot of a culture that treats desire as fate: men are the oxen, disciplined until they aren’t, and one small emblem of femininity can yank the whole machine off course.