Parenting & Family Quote by Philip Stanhope

"Women are only children of a larger growth. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about nor trusts them with serious matters"

Philip Stanhope, Statesman

About this Quote

Stanhope’s sentence is less an observation than a social technology: a manual for keeping women out of power while congratulating oneself for being “reasonable” about it. The insult is blunt (women as overgrown children), but the strategy is sophisticated. He doesn’t advise open hostility; he recommends management. “Trifles,” “plays,” “humours and flatters” turns domination into etiquette, a style of rule that can pass as charm. It’s patriarchy with good manners, the kind that survives precisely because it can be performed as civility.

The phrase “a man of sense” is doing most of the political work. It frames misogyny as prudence and casts dissent as irrational. If you consult women, you’re not progressive; you’re foolish. That’s an elegant little trap: exclude them from “serious matters,” then cite their lack of experience in serious matters as proof they shouldn’t be included.

Context sharpens the intent. Stanhope, an 18th-century British statesman steeped in court culture and patronage, wrote in an era when women’s formal access to education, property, and office was legally constrained, even as elite women exerted influence through salons, letters, and social networks. His line reads like a defensive response to that informal influence: acknowledge women’s social presence, then quarantine it. Let them animate the room; don’t let them steer the state.

The subtext is anxiety about authority leaking. Flattery becomes a firewall. Keep women pleased, keep them dependent, keep the public sphere “serious” by defining seriousness as male by default.

Quote Details

Topic	Equality
Source	Verified source: Letters to His Son (Philip Stanhope, 1774) Text match: 95.00% Provider: Cross-Reference Evidence: Women, then, are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid reasoning, good sense, I never knew in my life one that had it, or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together. Some little passion or humor always breaks upon their best resolutions. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with serious matters; though he often makes them believe that he does both; which is the thing in the world that they are proud of; for they love mightily to be dabbling in business (which by the way they always spoil); and being justly distrustful that men in general look upon them in a trifling light, they almost adore that man who talks more seriously to them, and who seems to consult and trust them; I say, who seems; for weak men really do, but wise ones only seem to do it. (Letter XLIX (dated "LONDON, September 5, O. S. 1748")). This passage appears in Lord Chesterfield’s letter to his son (Philip Stanhope) labeled LETTER XLIX, dated September 5, 1748 (Old Style). The letters themselves were private correspondence written in 1748, but the FIRST PUBLICATION was in the posthumous collection issued in 1774 under the title "Letters written by the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son, Philip Stanhope, together with several other pieces on various subjects, published by Mrs. Eugenia Stanhope." The commonly circulated standalone quote often omits the opening sentence beginning "Women, then," but the wording above matches the primary text in Chesterfield’s letter.
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