Women are the only exploited group in history to have been idealized into powerlessness.

Jong’s line points to a distinctive mechanism of gender oppression: women’s subordination is often maintained not only through coercion but through praise. By “idealized into powerlessness,” she suggests that cultural ideals—purity, self-sacrifice, delicacy, “femininity,” romantic pedestalization—can function as a soft form of control, making dependency and limited agency appear virtuous or desirable. The quote also implies a historical contrast: many exploited groups are openly devalued, whereas women have frequently been rhetorically elevated (as muses, mothers, angels of the house) in ways that mask unequal rights and material vulnerability. The sting of the aphorism is that admiration can be politically disabling when it substitutes for autonomy.