Life & Wisdom Quote by Carolyn Heilbrun

Power, in Heilbrun's telling, is treated less like an achievement than a trespass. The bite of "Ironically" lands first: it signals that what follows is not a mystery of human nature but a social contradiction we keep rehearsing. Men "have always had" power, so their authority reads as background noise, a default setting that rarely invites moral scrutiny. Women who "acquire" it, by contrast, are framed as having done something to get it, and the implied something is rarely flattering. The verb smuggles in suspicion: ambition becomes appetite; leadership becomes aggression; competence becomes coldness.

The sentence works because it exposes the asymmetry of evaluation, not just the asymmetry of access. Criticism is the enforcement mechanism. It teaches everyone watching which kinds of power are considered legitimate and which must be justified, softened, apologized for, or publicly punished. Heilbrun isn't arguing that powerful men escape critique entirely; she's pointing to the different genre of critique. Men are often judged on outcomes. Women are judged on temperament, tone, likability - whether they have violated the unwritten rule that authority should still feel comforting.

Context matters: Heilbrun, a feminist scholar and novelist who wrote incisively about women's narratives and the permission to live them, is diagnosing the cultural story problem. A woman in power disrupts a plotline that casts her as helper, muse, caretaker. The backlash is a demand that she return to the role, or at least pay a reputational tax for refusing it.