A popular statement on the Internet attributed to an American writer about the ability of women to prepare a salad, make a hat, or start a quarrel from scratch. We decided to check if he said anything like that.

This phrase, indicating Twain's authorship, appears on information And entertaining portals, social networks (Instagram*, Telegram, Facebook*) and on blog platforms (“Peekaboo", LiveJournal, "Zen"). In a slightly modified wording, the quote is sometimes attributed to French fashion designer Coco Chanel - she allegedly believed that a real woman should be able to do all of the above. If in the version supposedly written by Twain, the phrase is ironic, then in the version attributed to Chanel, it is more about a guide to action.

American writer Mark Twain is known for his humor and figurative, aphoristic language, so it is not surprising that, along with Nobel laureate Albert Einstein, he is among the leaders in the number of false attributed to to him quotes, many from which "Verified" already sorted it out previously. In the more than one hundred years since Twain's death, his literary legacy has been carefully studied and digitized. Therefore, checking whether this or that statement belongs to him is not so difficult.

The most complete collections of Twain's works can be found in the archives Mark Twain Projects Online, collected with the support of the University of California at Berkeley, in the database Twain Quotes, which includes texts written by Mark Twain or dedicated to the writer, and in electronic archive Twain, compiled by the University of Virginia Library. In none of them “Checked” was it possible to find a parsable quote. A similar phrase was not found in the large collection of quotes from the writer “Mark Twain at your fingertipsedited by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, who was friends with Twain's daughter and had access to the originals of most of his works.

Earliest happening publication of a statement about a woman’s ability to make a salad, a hat out of nothing, and a scandal that the Quote Investigator portal, which specializes in checking quotes, managed to find - a selection of aphorisms in The Canton Press newspaper dated June 7, 1907 (this issue was published three years before Twain’s death). However, like other statements from the collection, the phrase under discussion was printed without indicating anyone’s authorship. In subsequent years, the aphorism was found in other newspaper articles and collections of quotes - the word “scandal” was sometimes changed to “quarrel” or “argument”, but until 1959 Twain was not mentioned in connection with this quote. However, almost half a century after his death, the Canadian newspaper The Calgary Herald attributed authorship to the American writer, clarifying that “yes, it was Mark Twain” who expressed this idea.

Both before and after the publication of The Calgary Herald, the authorship of the quote was attributed to other famous personalities: not only Chanel, but also a German film star Marlene Dietrich, as well as American actor John Barrymore. However, if any of them ever used this phrase, they could hardly have been its author. At the time of its first publication in The Canton Press, Dietrich was only six years old. Chanel was already 23 years old by that time, but in 1907 she was still far from being so famous that her statements appeared in American newspapers. Barrymore was already a popular actor at the beginning of the 20th century, and he could well have been quoted by the press, but the first case of attribution of statements about a hat, salad and scandal to him, discovered by Quote Investigator, dates back to 1954, 12 years after the artist’s death.

Thus, there is no evidence that Mark Twain was the author of the statement in question. The quote was first published in an American newspaper without attribution and was probably subsequently attributed to Twain erroneously. Because of his fame as a witty writer whose works are full of aphorisms, it is quite reasonable to assume that he could say something like that.

*Russian authorities consider the company Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, to be an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.

Cover photo: Library of Congress, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons