Might does not make right

“Might does not make right” is both a moral lesson and a problem of belief in Jenny’s story: she comes to understand that power is made by people, yet finds that its force can feel natural and its defeat inevitable. The phrase first marks her reason for taking up bombs with William, then shadows her doubts about fighting power on its own terms and her later recognition that institutions distribute punishment and privilege unevenly.

A Lesson Learned, Then Unlearned

After returning from Japan, Jenny remembers English clichés stripped of their reassuring sound. “Might does not make right” stands among them, a “stunning truth” whose force has been dulled by repetition. She compares such lessons to vaccines administered in childhood: they are driven into the body early, yet their apparent familiarity can leave a person not truly believing them. The distinction between intellectual assent and bodily conviction becomes central to the phrase. The mind may accept that power is not justice, while the body still feels power as an inevitable victor.

Jenny describes that bodily sense of defeat as something power installs within its subjects. Power can seem natural and lodge like an ulcer, producing a private certainty that it will finally prevail. But she also recognizes that power is not an impersonal force: it is made up of people, including war makers and money-possessors, acting through elaborate tools. That recognition once impelled her to build bombs. She and William meant their attacks to expose government violence, not to recommend violence as a general remedy. The phrase thus names the conviction behind their action, while also revealing the difficulty of acting on a principle without reproducing the force it condemns.

The Doubt About Fighting on Power’s Terms

Jenny’s memory turns toward self-questioning. As the ground seems to tilt beneath her, she wonders whether she and William were mistaken to fight power on its own terms rather than reject those terms altogether. The change does not erase her earlier belief that resistance could expose injustice; it makes the method itself newly uncertain. Bombs are not inherently good, she acknowledges, but inherently evil, even when their intended political meaning is denunciation rather than endorsement. “Might does not make right” therefore becomes more than an argument against the powerful: it also tests the moral claims of those who oppose them.

That uncertainty recurs in Jenny’s later response to Pauline’s proposal to teach women about firearms. Pauline wants the lessons to help women understand weapons, not hurt or kill anyone. Jenny dislikes guns, but the group begins with parts, ballistics, and categories of firearm before dismantling and cleaning a 12-gauge shotgun. The practical knowledge brings pleasure in learning without embarrassment. It offers a way to understand an instrument of power without treating its use as inevitable or virtuous. For Jenny, the question becomes whether knowledge can weaken the authority of violence rather than simply prepare someone to wield it.

Knowledge, Gender, and Authority

The women’s discussions connect that learning to a broader imbalance in who is presumed to know. Jenny, Sandy, Joanne, Lena, and Pauline recognize that women have often presented themselves as more knowledgeable than they are, privately trying to catch up, while men can rely on a culture of already knowing. The group finds something different in learning together: the freedom to ask, to be uncertain, and to experience the pleasure of knowing something for the first time. In this setting, understanding a gun becomes part of challenging the social confidence that makes male authority seem natural.

Their political discussion sharpens the challenge. Pauline argues that women must assume leadership in revolution, after the group recognizes that women have often followed and that celebrated women revolutionaries have been treated as helpmeets to more-worshipped men. She reads William’s methods, and the armed abduction of Pauline by her former comrades, as examples of men pursuing even positive change in masculine, violent ways. Jenny resists turning that pattern into a claim that men are doomed by nature to act in one way; she compares it to saying women do housework because it is their nature. The exchange extends the phrase’s logic: power should not be mistaken for right, but neither should a critique of power become a fixed rule about what any group must be.

Law, Privilege, and Unequal Consequences

The phrase’s final resonance lies in the gap between moral and legal accounting. Jenny and Pauline will be tried and sentenced only for acts committed before they met, leaving their time together outside the record. No one will be charged with Mr. Morton’s murder. The outcomes do not neatly correspond to the crimes or to the women’s shared history, and the legal system’s classifications leave much of their experience unseen.

Pauline will be convicted of bank robbery and serve less than two years before her sentence is commuted. Though the papers will say she has had “the book thrown at her,” she will emerge without prison’s stigma, treated as a victim of her attorneys and ultimately as someone whose class privilege has survived the ordeal. Jenny, sentenced to the minimum for the selective service recruitment center bombings, will enter work release after a year for good behavior. The apparent leniency brings a different cost: she feels shame, learns to be grateful for special treatment, and sees herself as “The model minority,” rewarded as an example against supposedly less worthy kin. In these contrasting outcomes, power operates not only through direct force but through the judgments that decide who is redeemed, who is marked, and whose suffering counts. “Might does not make right” remains a moral claim, but the story shows how difficult it is to make institutions act as though that claim were true.