Daily Inspiration Quote by Ellen Glasgow

Glasgow’s line lands like a compliment until it twists the knife: trouble, she suggests, is not merely endured by women but handled, turned over in the lap, worked into something patterned and familiar. The simile is doing the heavy lifting. Knitting is repetitive, skilled, domestic, quietly productive. To compare “trouble” to that kind of handiwork is to point at a culture that trained women to be fluent in managing discomfort without making a spectacle of it. You don’t just survive; you make it look useful.

There’s bite in the phrasing “Women like to,” because it flirts with stereotype while exposing the conditions that manufacture it. Glasgow isn’t naively claiming women enjoy suffering; she’s sketching a social psychology built from limited options. When public power, money, and mobility are restricted, private life becomes the only arena where agency can be exercised. Trouble becomes material: something to arrange, narrate, and even aestheticize. That’s not masochism so much as adaptation.

The subtext is also a warning about self-seduction. If trouble can be treated like knitting, it can become habit, identity, even a kind of status. The line pricks at the temptation to “sit down” with pain rather than stand up against the structures producing it. Coming from a Southern realist who wrote about the slow violence of convention, the remark reads as both observation and critique: a portrait of enforced stoicism that risks hardening into preference.