📜 Historical Origins
🗣 “Women should be seen and not heard”
- Era: Late Middle Ages (15th-century conduct manuals, 19th-century homiletic literature)
- Roots: Literal translation of Greek maxim γυναῖκα σιγαν ἄξιον (“A woman’s silence is best”), attributed to the Stoics and preserved in monastic collections
- Cultural Path: Adopted into English Puritan household codes, later solidified in Victorian England as the expectation that a woman’s decorative refinement outweighed her public speech
💍 “Behind every great man there is a great woman”
- Era: Early 20th century
- Earliest Records:
- Columbia (Knights of Columbus magazine, 1938)
- FDR campaign button (1944): “Behind every great man is a woman; vote for Eleanor”
- Meaning: More than flattery—asserted that men’s public achievements depended on a wife’s/mother’s hidden labour, strategic counsel, prayer, and sacrifice
- Framework: Roles viewed as complementary, not subordinate, within a Western Christian social order of distinct but interdependent vocations
⚖ Shared Worldview
Both sayings carried the same underlying anthropology:
- Men and women are ontologically equal (imago Dei), yet functionally different
- Division of roles:
- One sex labours outside
- The other holds the moral and spiritual center of the home
- Together they form the micro-cosmos of civilisation
That equilibrium collapsed after the 1960s under neoliberal doctrine:
- Unlike classical liberalism, neoliberalism reduces all social goods to fungible human capital
- Worth is measured solely by the ability to monetise labour time and accumulate market power
- Reframes:
- Complementarity → “Inequality”
- Sacrifice → “Exploitation”
- Moral authority → “Patriarchal oppression”
💸 Neoliberal Disruption
- Classical Liberalism: Recognised distinct social goods beyond market value
- Neoliberalism: Collapses all goods into human capital, erasing role distinctions
📊 Role & Value Transformation
| 👑 Old Equilibrium | 🏢 Neoliberal Trap | 🛡️ Counter Formula |
|---|---|---|
| Husband = shield | HR = neutral arbitrator | Husband = steward in chief |
| Wife = heart & hearth | Salary badge > motherhood | Wife = matriarch architect |
| Children = human capital | Future HR heads | Children = heirs of the ages |
| Virtue = soul currency | GDP token | Virtue = civilisational reserve asset |
🗑 Erasure & Distortion
- “Women should be seen and not heard” — reframed as proof of universal silencing, ignoring its etiquette origins
- “Behind every great man is a great woman” — discarded because:
- “Greatness” rooted in duty to God, family, nation does not fit market logic
- Valuing unpaid work undermines market supremacy
🔍 The Core Problem
If unpaid, hidden labour especially that of wives and mothers were valued as equal or greater than corporate output, the neoliberal cathedral would collapse:
- The market thrives on interchangeable productivity units
- Any differentiation is labelled “systemic oppression” requiring bureaucratic correction
Thus, both proverbs have been distorted beyond recognition or erased entirely, replaced with the mantra: men and women are identical in function, and only market productivity defines worth
