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

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this line in the early chapters of *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792), her landmark response to Enlightenment debates about “rights” that often excluded women. Writing amid the political ferment of the French Revolution and British arguments over education and citizenship, she targets the social training that makes women dependent, ornamental, and ruled by “sensibility” rather than reason. The remark appears as she clarifies that her aim is not female domination but female self-government: women should be educated to cultivate virtue and rational independence, so that marriage, family life, and public morals improve rather than rest on coercion or manipulation.

The sentence distinguishes autonomy from supremacy. Wollstonecraft rejects a zero-sum model of gender power (“women over men”) and instead argues for self-mastery: the capacity to direct one’s own life through reason, education, and moral agency. The bracketed “women” signals her focus on women as a class constrained by custom, while “power over themselves” reframes emancipation as internal and civic competence—freedom from dependence, frivolity, and enforced ignorance. The line also anticipates later feminist arguments that equality is not reversal of hierarchy but the dismantling of hierarchy, replacing domination with reciprocal respect and shared responsibility in private and public life.