Wit & Attitude Quote by Helen Rowland

Rowland’s line lands like a salon-room remix of Lincoln: same cadence, sharper teeth. The intent is not to flatter women or demonize men so much as to puncture a favorite male fantasy of the era - that “female gullibility” is a stable resource a clever man can reliably extract. By slicing “women” into “some” and “all,” then narrowing down to “the same woman” and “the same man” and “the same way,” she turns a sweeping stereotype into a logistical problem. Her wit works because it performs its own rebuttal: every clause tightens the net until the original generalization can’t breathe.

The subtext is a quiet power shift. Rowland concedes that deception happens (no moral lecture, no melodrama), then insists that repetition is where the con fails. The “more than half of the time” kicker is especially sly: it’s not idealistic “women always wise up,” it’s probabilistic, almost scientific. She grants human fallibility while preserving a core claim about learning, pattern recognition, and the limits of any one man’s playbook. The man isn’t condemned for lying; he’s mocked for thinking his lies are endlessly reusable.

Context matters. As an early 20th-century journalist writing in an age of rigid gender scripts, Rowland often smuggled social critique through comedy. The line flatters women’s adaptability and experience while skewering masculine confidence as repetitive and lazy. It’s feminism by punchline: not a manifesto, a diagnosis delivered with a raised eyebrow.