The Rights of Woman Women and Femininity Quotes

This is kind of a bummer. Women can't be friends with men, the speaker says. It's like that famous line from When Harry Met Sally. Only instead of "the sex thing" always getting in the way (as Harry puts it in the movie), the speaker says that men and women can't be friends because if a woman lets her guard down at all, she'll lose control. So when the speaker says that women "can never be free," there's a double meaning: first, it means that a woman can't be too free, or too careless with how she interacts with men. But it also suggests that by putting herself in charge, a woman basically imprisons herself there. She can never let her guard down, and so she can never do anything but command. The speaker's highlighting the boredom and loneliness that comes with being at the top of the heat.

At the end of the poem, the speaker backs off—she says that women won't be satisfied with "conquest," because, as the speaker just pointed out, it gets boring and lonely at the top. But women can learn a thing or two from Nature with a capital N. If men and women love each other equally, they don't really need to worry about separate rights. By asking women to learn from Nature, the speaker suggests that this is the natural state of things. This is something we can't argue with, she says. It's just the way things are.