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

The line is associated with Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist political philosophy in the early 1790s, when she argued that women’s apparent “power” in society often came indirectly—through charm, dependence, or influence over men—rather than through education and civic equality. Writing amid the debates sparked by the French Revolution and British responses to it, Wollstonecraft insisted that women be treated as rational moral agents. Her aim was not to invert patriarchy by giving women dominion over men, but to secure women’s autonomy: the capacity for self-government grounded in reason, virtue, and education.

Wollstonecraft distinguishes domination from freedom. “Power over men” would merely reproduce the logic of tyranny and dependence, substituting one hierarchy for another. What she seeks is “power over themselves”: self-command, moral independence, and the ability to act from reason rather than from social coercion or the need to please. The remark encapsulates her broader claim that equality is not chiefly about social advantage but about cultivating virtue and agency. In this view, women’s liberation requires education and rights that enable self-determination, not a new form of gendered supremacy.