"People of substance may sin without being exposed for their stolen pleasure; but servants and the poorer sort of women have seldom an opportunity of concealing a big belly, or at least the consequences of it"
About this Quote
Mandeville lands the knife where polite morality pretends not to feel it: sin is not equally legible. In a single, almost offhand image - the “big belly” - he turns virtue into a class privilege and surveillance into a social technology. The line isn’t chiefly about sex; it’s about who gets to have a private life. “People of substance” can buy discretion, medical help, hush money, a sympathetic midwife, a second household, a story. The poor, especially women in service, carry the evidence on their bodies. Their desires aren’t more scandalous; they’re simply harder to hide in a world that offers them no buffers.
The phrasing drips with Mandeville’s signature cynicism. “Stolen pleasure” sounds like the moralists’ language, but he wields it to expose the hypocrisy underneath: society condemns vice in theory while quietly arranging for the powerful to practice it safely. Meanwhile, the lower orders are forced into a kind of involuntary honesty. Pregnancy becomes a public indictment, not of the man involved, but of the woman’s “imprudence,” with consequences that are economic as much as reputational - dismissal, poverty, coercive marriage, institutional punishment.
Context matters: early 18th-century England is obsessed with policing “lewdness” while running on unequal labor and patronage. Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, delights in showing how moral posturing props up social hierarchies. The subtext is brutal: what gets called “morality” is often just the ability to manage appearances, and appearances are easiest to manage when you’re rich.
The phrasing drips with Mandeville’s signature cynicism. “Stolen pleasure” sounds like the moralists’ language, but he wields it to expose the hypocrisy underneath: society condemns vice in theory while quietly arranging for the powerful to practice it safely. Meanwhile, the lower orders are forced into a kind of involuntary honesty. Pregnancy becomes a public indictment, not of the man involved, but of the woman’s “imprudence,” with consequences that are economic as much as reputational - dismissal, poverty, coercive marriage, institutional punishment.
Context matters: early 18th-century England is obsessed with policing “lewdness” while running on unequal labor and patronage. Mandeville, author of The Fable of the Bees, delights in showing how moral posturing props up social hierarchies. The subtext is brutal: what gets called “morality” is often just the ability to manage appearances, and appearances are easiest to manage when you’re rich.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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