Looking at the portrayal of powerful women in history, one can learn what is possible.

The ability to think independently enables both women and men to obtain what they want.

Ultimately, everyone must stand up for their beliefs, whatever the consequences.

I remember my French friend saying something surprising to me once. I was studying psychology in Paris at the Sorbonne in the '70s and had made friends with a brilliant woman who was 10 years older than me. She said, "Women don't need women's lib. They can get what they want from men if they want it enough."

"What makes you think that?" I asked. I was just 30, and my husband had just left me for another woman. I was devastated. I certainly did not feel I could get what I wanted from men, or women, for that matter.

"Look at the Princess de Clèves," she said, speaking of the 17th-century novel written by Madame de Lafayette, though published initially anonymously.

"She never got what she wanted," I said. "She was madly in love with the Duc de Nemours, and she could never marry him."

"She is the one who turns him down in the end. And just look at all the other real women in the book: Diane de Poitiers, the king's mistress, who got everything she wanted from Henri II even though she was 20 years older than he was and had probably been his father's mistress; and when Henri died, Catherine de Medici became the mother of three French kings, first Francois II, who was married to Mary Stuart, who told him what to do."

"Well, look what happened to her in the end!" I said, referring to the ultimate beheading of Mary Stuart by her powerful cousin Elizabeth I of England when Mary had become Mary Queen of Scots.

Yet, certainly, my friend was not entirely wrong. This same theme was, of course, taken up in literature and in life again and again, by later writers like the three Brontë sisters, in the 19th century. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë. Though they, too, wrote anonymously under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, hiding their sex, they fought valiantly for women's rights in their works.

When Jane Eyre, in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre, has just discovered Mr. Rochester's living wife, he asks Jane who would know or care if she married him. She answers: "I care for myself!" Her own conscience and moral code are what regulate her existence. Her strength comes from her independent thinking and her willingness to act on it, which eventually meant speaking up.

Often this ability comes through suffering and difficulties overcome, but ultimately our intrinsic value as a human being, our power as a man or woman, comes from our belief in ourselves and our ability to speak up—to have the courage and conviction to stand up for what we believe is right, whatever the consequences.

Madame de Lafayette. The Princesse de Clèves. Oxford World's Classics.

Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre.

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