Education Quote by W. L. George

The line lands with the brittle confidence of an era that mistook exclusion for evidence. W. L. George frames a blunt hierarchy - “less civilized” - then slips in a qualifier that quietly rearranges the blame: “largely because she has not been educated.” The sentence performs a familiar early-20th-century maneuver. It repeats a sexist assumption in the first clause, then offers a seemingly rational, even reformist explanation in the second. The result is a kind of paternal progressivism: women are judged by standards set by men, then “rescued” by a solution controlled by the same system that withheld opportunity in the first place.

The intent is double-edged. On its surface, it can read as a pro-education argument, aligning with contemporary debates around women’s schooling and suffrage. Yet the subtext is less emancipatory than managerial. “Civilized” is doing imperial work here: it’s not just about literacy; it’s about manners, sexual norms, domestic roles, and public legitimacy. To call women “less civilized” is to make their exclusion feel like a natural condition rather than a political arrangement. Education becomes a civilizing tool, not a right.

Context matters: in a period when women’s public participation was expanding, anxieties about changing gender roles often got repackaged as social science. George’s phrasing aims to sound objective while policing status. It’s rhetoric that concedes reform only after reinforcing the premise that women begin as a deficit.