“The measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family”

The saying “the measure of a man is how he treats the women in his family” distills Papaw’s standard of character into an everyday test: how a man treats those closest to him. The narrator remembers it not as an abstract maxim but as a principle Papaw enforced within the family—and one shaped by Papaw’s recognition of his own earlier failures.

Meaning and Origin

Papaw’s rule made conduct toward women the measure of manhood. Its force in the narrator’s recollection comes partly from its source: Papaw’s wisdom, the narrator observes, grew out of his own past failures to treat the women in his family well. The maxim therefore carries both judgment and an acknowledgment that the person stating it had not always lived up to it.

A Standard Practiced at Home

The narrator recalls that losing his temper with Mom, Lindsay, or Mamaw was among the few occasions when Papaw showed a mean streak. The rule made such moments consequential: Papaw’s response linked a boy’s behavior toward female relatives to the kind of man he might become. It also sat alongside a more openly affectionate side of Papaw, who played with the narrator and Aunt Wee’s baby girls and welcomed hugs and kisses.

Papaw’s care could take practical form, too. He bought Lindsay a car, fixed it after she wrecked it, and bought and repaired another so that she would not feel she “came from nothing.” In the narrator’s memory, that gesture gives the maxim a material dimension: treating women well meant attending to their dignity and sense of belonging, not merely avoiding anger.

Recollection and Legacy

At Papaw’s funeral, the narrator recalled the maxim while thinking about the times he had lost his temper with Mom, Lindsay, or Mamaw. He then stood to explain that, although he had never had a dad, Papaw had always been there and had taught him what men needed to know. He called Papaw the best dad anyone could ask for. The saying thus became part of the narrator’s account of Papaw’s fatherly influence: a demanding rule grounded in remembered care, and in a man’s awareness of the failures from which his wisdom had come.