Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey;
All else confusion.

These lines come from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long narrative poem *The Princess* (1847), a work written amid intense Victorian debate about women’s education and public roles. The poem imagines a women’s university founded by Princess Ida, provoking conflict with male suitors and with prevailing social expectations. In the poem’s climactic movement toward reconciliation, the speaker articulates a conventional doctrine of “separate spheres,” assigning men to public action and authority and women to domesticity and obedience. The passage reflects mid-19th-century English gender ideology rather than a neutral description of nature, and it has often been cited as a succinct expression of Victorian patriarchy.

The stanza asserts a rigid division of labor and power between the sexes: men belong to the “field” and “sword” (public life, war, governance), while women belong to the “hearth” and “needle” (home, domestic work). The paired oppositions—head/heart, command/obey—present hierarchy as harmony, culminating in the warning that anything outside this binary produces “confusion.” Read within *The Princess*, the lines function as a rhetorical attempt to resolve social conflict by reasserting traditional order; read historically, they crystallize the Victorian “separate spheres” ideology that later critics and feminist readers have challenged as naturalizing inequality under the guise of complementarity.