August 27, 2026

Power Over Yourself

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Wollstonecraft wrote this in 1792, in the middle of revolutionary upheaval across France and England, arguing that women had been trained into weakness and pleasing manners rather than reason and strength. She was not asking for dominance over men but for something harder to win: the courage to think for oneself and answer to one's own judgment. Ridiculed in her lifetime and condemned after her death for how she lived, she staked her whole argument on the claim that real courage begins inside a person, not in status or control over others. Her words still cut against the instinct to seek power or approval from outside, pointing instead to the harder work of governing oneself.