Parenting & Family Quote by Ellen Glasgow

Glasgow slips a scalpel into what looks like a folksy compliment. “Fun” is the bait: a bright, almost domestic word that lowers the reader’s defenses. Then she makes her real move, yoking “children and men” together as co-conspirators in the world’s mischief and delight, and puncturing the pomp of adulthood with the blunt vernacular of “ain’t a mite.” The line works because it sounds like common sense while quietly staging an indictment.

The subtext isn’t that men are innocent; it’s that male power often keeps the emotional privileges of childhood - appetite, impulsiveness, the expectation of indulgence - long after society grants them authority. “Under the skins” is doing heavy lifting: it suggests that the difference between childishness and manliness is less moral evolution than costuming, a social script layered over the same hungers and vanities. Glasgow’s choice of “skins,” not “souls” or “hearts,” makes it bodily, animal, unromantic.

Context matters. Writing in a period when women were expected to be the grown-ups of the household - managers of consequence, reputation, and restraint - Glasgow frames “fun” as both a charm and a hazard. Children bring chaos honestly; men often institutionalize it. The sting is that the world calls one stage “immaturity” and the other “character,” even when the behavior is identical. It’s a wry, Southern-flavored feminism: not a manifesto, a diagnosis delivered with a smile that doesn’t let anyone off the hook.