Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas More

A Tudor-era wink with a steel edge: the line pretends to grant women power while tightening the era's grip on what that power is allowed to mean. "Disguise our bondage as we will" frames men as captives, but the captivity is theatrical, self-authored, something men can "disguise" at will. That word quietly gives the game away: this is not a confession of genuine subordination so much as a performance of gallantry that keeps male agency intact. If bondage can be disguised, it can be rearranged, narrated, denied.

The couplet works because it flatters and disciplines at the same time. "Woman, woman" is both insistence and reduction: not a particular person with political standing, but an archetype invoked to explain male behavior. The implied joke is that men, who run institutions, laws, property, and pulpits, are nonetheless "ruled" by the private forces of desire, marriage, and domestic negotiation. It's a tidy rhetorical escape hatch: blame women for men's choices while maintaining that public authority remains male.

Context matters. More writes from a world where women's formal power is constrained, yet court life is saturated with patronage, marriage alliances, and the soft governance of intimacy. The line converts that social reality into a safe, almost comic paradox: women rule, but only in ways men can frame as seduction rather than sovereignty. The intent isn't to elevate women; it's to reassure men that even their vulnerabilities can be turned into a story where they remain the narrators.