"Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them"
About this Quote
Schreiner strips the romance out of authority and hands you something colder: power is treated as instinct, not a policy choice. The exclamation point is doing work here. "Power!" lands like a diagnosis, not a rallying cry, then she pivots into a question that’s really an accusation: when, exactly, do men get cross-examined for their entitlement? The phrasing "other souls" widens the frame beyond women-as-a-category into the moral terrain of personhood. It’s not just that women are denied rights; it’s that their inner lives are treated as territory.
The subtext is an indictment of how domination gets naturalized. By saying power "is born in them", Schreiner mimics the logic used to excuse patriarchy: boys will be boys, leaders are made that way, command is biological. But her irony is surgical. If power is innate, then accountability evaporates - and so does the possibility of democracy, which depends on the premise that power can be granted, limited, revoked. She exposes the trick: presenting hierarchy as nature so no one has to defend it as an ideology.
Context matters. Schreiner wrote out of the late Victorian machine of empire and gender, when "separate spheres" ideology and colonial rule both relied on the same alibi: some people are simply destined to command. Her line compresses feminism and anti-imperial critique into one provocation, asking why the most consequential human arrangement - who gets to shape whose life - is so rarely put to a vote.
The subtext is an indictment of how domination gets naturalized. By saying power "is born in them", Schreiner mimics the logic used to excuse patriarchy: boys will be boys, leaders are made that way, command is biological. But her irony is surgical. If power is innate, then accountability evaporates - and so does the possibility of democracy, which depends on the premise that power can be granted, limited, revoked. She exposes the trick: presenting hierarchy as nature so no one has to defend it as an ideology.
Context matters. Schreiner wrote out of the late Victorian machine of empire and gender, when "separate spheres" ideology and colonial rule both relied on the same alibi: some people are simply destined to command. Her line compresses feminism and anti-imperial critique into one provocation, asking why the most consequential human arrangement - who gets to shape whose life - is so rarely put to a vote.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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