Love & Passion Quote by Agnes Smedley

Smedley is trying to pry masculinity loose from the crude, colonial measuring stick that equates “man” with dominance and emotional bluntness. The tell is her careful stacking of terms: “refined” is framed not as weakness but as an achievement, and “qualities often attributed to the female sex” is presented as an indictment of the attribution itself, not of the qualities. She’s arguing that tenderness, restraint, aesthetic sensibility, or social tact (the usual Victorian grab bag of “feminine” traits) can live inside male bodies without canceling their strength. In other words: the binary is cultural theater, not biology.

The context matters because “among the Indians” is doing double duty. On one hand, it’s a counterexample to Western gender orthodoxy, a way of saying: your rules aren’t universal; other societies produce men who don’t need performative hardness to be respected. On the other, it risks the period’s familiar move of romanticizing Indigenous people as moral corrective - praising them in order to criticize modernity, while still flattening them into a useful symbol. Smedley’s “often to be found” suggests she’s reporting an observation, but the phrasing carries the anthropology-of-its-time whiff of generalization.

Still, the sentence lands because it’s built like a rebuttal. She anticipates the snicker - refined, feminine, therefore not “real men” - and then snaps the door shut: “Yet they are men, and strong ones.” The quiet provocation is that strength might look like softness, and the West’s panic about that says more about the West than about the men she’s describing.