Educated

by Tara Westover

I realize now that that night I was seeing her for the first time, the secret strength of her.

“Men like to think they’re saving some brain-dead woman who’s got herself into a scrape. All I had to do was step aside and let him play the hero!”

positive liberty is self-mastery—the rule of the self, by the self. To have positive liberty, he explained, is to take control of one’s own mind; to be liberated from irrational fears and beliefs, from addictions, superstitions and all other forms of self-coercion.

Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.