Justice & Law Quote by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray doesn’t just insult women here; he stages a whole Victorian fantasy about rationality as a male-owned property and emotion as female sabotage. “The book of female logic” is a sneering metaphor that pretends women even have a system of reasoning, then promptly disqualifies it as illegible: “blotted all over with tears.” The image is clever in its cruelty. Tears aren’t merely evidence of feeling; they’re treated as a literal solvent that dissolves language, record, and rule. Logic becomes paperwork ruined by water damage, an administrative nightmare masquerading as a moral judgment.

“Justice in their courts is forever in a passion” extends the caricature from private sentiment to public governance. It’s not enough that women feel; their feelings supposedly contaminate the machinery of judgment. The subtext is a defense of existing power arrangements: if women are temperamentally unfit for impartiality, then excluding them from civic authority looks like common sense rather than discrimination. Thackeray’s phrasing also taps into an older British anxiety about “petticoat government,” where influence operates through mood, persuasion, and domestic leverage rather than parliamentary procedure.

As a novelist and satirist of manners, Thackeray writes from a culture that prized self-command as the badge of class and masculinity. The line works because it’s punchy and performatively amused: it invites the reader to join the author’s smirk, to feel sophisticated while absorbing a ready-made stereotype. Its rhetorical efficiency is the point - a neat epigram that turns prejudice into wit, and wit into permission.