Daily Inspiration Quote by Cornelia Otis Skinner

“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.