Daily Inspiration Quote by Ellen Glasgow

Glasgow frames gender not as a social fact but as a theological prank: women as "enigmas" planted by the Almighty to keep men intellectually humbled. It lands because it flatters and needles at once. Men get cast as the default interpreters of the world, confident enough to think they can solve it; women become the riddle that exposes the limits of that confidence. The joke is barbed: the very impulse to "prove" superiority turns men into the butt of the experiment.

The line also borrows the authority of religion to smuggle in a social critique. By invoking God, Glasgow mimics the grand explanatory systems men have historically used to justify their dominance. But she flips the script. The divine order here doesn't sanctify male mastery; it sabotages it. "He knows more than they do" is less piety than punchline, a reminder that patriarchal certainty is often just a costume for ignorance.

Context matters: Glasgow wrote in an era when women's interior lives were routinely treated as secondary, sentimental, or simply unknowable. Calling women an "enigma" risks repeating that old trope, but Glasgow weaponizes it. The mystery isn't evidence of women's irrationality; it's evidence of men's entitlement - the assumption that women should be legible on demand, explainable, solvable. Her intent feels less like mystifying women than diagnosing the male need to reduce them to a problem set, and laughing at how badly that project tends to go.