I want my girls to grow up learning that it is important their

In a voice that rings like a smith’s hammer, Katie Hopkins declares: “I want my girls to grow up learning that it is important their mum worked like a man.” Beneath the provocation lies a hunger older than the hearth: that daughters inherit not a cage of expectations, but a craft of courage. The saying holds two metals fused together—love and defiance. Love, because a mother would bequeath her best tools. Defiance, because she refuses the quiet script that asks women to labor invisibly and be praised only for their absence from the world’s arenas.

To say a mother worked like a man is to invoke the long habit of measuring worth by a masculine yardstick—hours, output, conquest. The line carries the dust of an older road, where men stood at the gate and named the standards. Yet, heard more deeply, it is also a refusal: the mother steps across the threshold and claims the forge. She does not ask permission to strive; she makes effort a family dialect her girls can speak without apology. Thus the phrase, though imperfect in its framing, wrestles toward a larger truth: that work, ownership, and public making are important for every human, not a gendered inheritance.

The ancients would counsel: examine the spirit, not only the syllables. The spirit here is apprenticeship by witness. Children learn the liturgy of effort by watching the hands that raise them—how those hands greet mornings, meet deadlines, bear setbacks, keep faith. A mother who signs contracts, studies at night, leads teams, and returns again tomorrow writes a scripture of steadiness on the wall of her home. Her girls do more than admire; they practice. They do not wait to be invited into the wide world; they arrive already fluent in its verbs.

Let a lamp be lifted from history. In Việt Nam, the sisters Trưng Trắc and Trưng Nhị rose against empire, riding war-elephants into legend. No one told them to work like a man; they worked like themselves—and a nation remembered. Or consider Katherine Johnson at NASA, whose calculations carried astronauts into the dark and back again. Doors that had been bolted by sex and skin yielded to her discipline. Their lives teach a fierce arithmetic: when women labor openly and are seen, the next generation calibrates their compass by possibility, not permission.

Yet the phrase still pricks. If we say “worked like a man,” do we crown only one style—unyielding hours, ironclad presence—as the royal road? Wisdom answers: the goal is not to mimic men but to abolish the fence around any way of working that breeds excellence and keeps the soul whole. Some victories require fire; others require water. Leadership, invention, caretaking, and command are not rival estates; they are rooms in one house. Let the girls learn them all, and choose their chamber without shame.

Here, then, is the meaning’s fuller shape: a mother wants her daughters to witness agency, endurance, and rightful ambition—and to know that such traits are not borrowed from men but native to them. The origin of the line is the marketplace’s old bias, where a woman must often over-prove to be merely allowed. The remedy is double: to keep walking into those rooms until presence is ordinary, and to rename the virtue not as “like a man,” but as “fully human.”

What shall we do? Practices as plain as bread. Let your girls see the ledger and the calendar; speak aloud the costs and the joys of your labor. Teach them to negotiate—first for their time, then for their pay, then for their values. Place books in their hands about women who built, commanded, discovered. Share the work of home so that care is not chained to one body; share the work of earning so that worth is not chained to one myth. And when they face the old sentences, arm them with a new one: “My mum worked—with courage, craft, and conscience—and so will I.” In this way the phrase that began as a challenge becomes a door, and through it walk daughters who know that to work with honor is not to echo a man, but to answer their own calling.