"I never expect men to give us liberty. No, women, we are not worth it until we take it"

Voltairine de Cleyre compresses a radical ethic of self-emancipation: liberty is not a gift dispensed by benevolent authorities but an achievement wrested through autonomous action. The line rejects paternalism and the politics of supplication, where women petition men for rights as if asking favors. Dependence on a grantor leaves the grantor sovereign; only by acting as free agents do women convert freedom from permission into possession. The stance is strategic as well as moral: power rarely relinquishes itself, and waiting for it to do so breeds resignation and co-optation.

“We are not worth it until we take it” is deliberately jarring. It is not a denial of intrinsic human worth, but a diagnosis of how worth is recognized within social power relations. A society that measures value through force, competence, and resolve will not account women equal until women act equal. Taking liberty creates the proof of capacity that commands acknowledgment. It also reshapes the self; courage, discipline, and solidarity forged in struggle become the inner infrastructure of freedom. Rights secured without the habits of autonomy are brittle; the act of seizing liberty builds the character that sustains it.

The imperative points beyond legal reforms to the cultivation of independent power: education, economic self-sufficiency, control over one’s body, organizing at work and in communities, mutual aid, refusal of unjust commands, creation of institutions that do not rely on patriarchal gatekeepers. Men may be allies, but not patrons; alliance that respects agency is compatible with this ethic, tutelage is not. The words challenge any politics of waiting, waiting for a legislature, a court, a cultural awakening, to confer dignity. Freedom is practiced into being, and social recognition follows practice. By insisting on action first, de Cleyre unites strategy with self-respect: take liberty to become the kind of people who can keep it, and in taking it, reveal its universality.