Quote #206715
Nature makes woman to be won and men to win.
George William Curtis
About This Quote
This quote needs no introduction—at least for now. We're working on adding more context soon.
Interpretation
The line expresses a Victorian-era, highly gender-essentialist view of heterosexual courtship: women are cast as the “prize” or object of pursuit, while men are framed as active agents whose role is conquest or achievement. By attributing this arrangement to “Nature,” the speaker presents it as innate and inevitable rather than cultural—an argument often used in the nineteenth century to justify conventional social roles. Read today, the quote is significant less as guidance than as evidence of how romantic ideology could naturalize unequal power dynamics, reducing women’s agency and defining masculinity through competition and winning.




