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Daily Inspiration Quote by Cornelia Otis Skinner

"Women's virtue is man's greatest invention"

About this Quote

“Women’s virtue” lands here like a museum label: tidy, polished, and suspiciously curated. Cornelia Otis Skinner, an actress with a lifelong feel for performance and persona, is pointing at the stagecraft behind morality itself. The line is less a compliment to women than a jab at the apparatus that defines them. Calling virtue “man’s greatest invention” reframes chastity, purity, self-sacrifice, and “goodness” not as timeless qualities but as a useful technology: designed, marketed, and enforced.

The intent reads as tart and theatrical, a backstage aside delivered to the audience with raised eyebrow. Skinner isn’t denying women can be ethical; she’s attacking the gendered script that turns female behavior into a public asset managed by men. “Virtue” becomes a brand that protects male lineage, male reputation, male comfort. If women are tasked with being the moral gatekeepers, men get to play both sides: policing desire while indulging it, demanding innocence while consuming it.

Context matters: Skinner came of age when “respectability” was a currency women paid with their bodies and choices, and when the entertainment world made those rules especially visible. Actresses were expected to embody glamour while proving purity, a contradiction that exposes how arbitrary the standard is. The subtext is blunt: when society praises women’s virtue, it often means society has found a prettier way to control women. The brilliance is the word “invention” - it turns a sanctified ideal into a patent, a power move, a con.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
Source
Later attribution: Women Know Everything! (Karen Weekes, 2011) modern compilationISBN: 9781594745454 · ID: 46nduIAfxFgC
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Women's virtue is man's greatest invention . -CORNELIA OTIS SKINNER ( 1899-1979 ) AMERICAN WRITER AND ACTOR I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body . -ELAYNE BOOSLER ( 1952- ) AMERICAN COMEDIAN I would have girls regard ...
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Skinner, Cornelia Otis. (2026, February 22). Women's virtue is man's greatest invention. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/womens-virtue-is-mans-greatest-invention-110670/

Chicago Style
Skinner, Cornelia Otis. "Women's virtue is man's greatest invention." FixQuotes. February 22, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/womens-virtue-is-mans-greatest-invention-110670/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Women's virtue is man's greatest invention." FixQuotes, 22 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/womens-virtue-is-mans-greatest-invention-110670/. Accessed 27 Mar. 2026.

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Womens Virtue is Mans Greatest Invention by Cornelia Otis Skinner
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About the Author

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Cornelia Otis Skinner (May 30, 1901 - July 9, 1979) was a Actress from USA.

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