The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Harriet Rubin.
Title: The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women.
Author: Harriet Rubin.
Genre: Non-fiction, how-tos, business and finance, philosophy, feminism, politics, history.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1997.
Summary: For centuries men have used the lessons of Machiavelli's The Prince to gain and hold power. Today's women must learn a crucial lesson of their own: men and women are not equal - and that is a woman's greatest strength. From the wars of intimacy to battles of public life, whether confronting bosses, competitors, or lovers, the greatest power belongs to the woman who dares to use the subtle weapons that are hers alone. This provocative work urges women to claim what they want and deserve, offering a bold new battle plan that celebrates a woman's unique gifts: passion and intuition, sensitivity and cunning. It draws from history's legendary female divas and poets, saints and sinners, artists and activists whose lasting legacy is codified in: act like a woman, fight like a woman, and life will be yours to command.
My rating: 8.5/10.
My Review:
♥ “If you earnestly seek that which is not your own, you lose that which is your own,” Epictetus wrote. If, in other words, you set your heart on your health, your love, your pleasure, your career, you’ll regret it. None of these things are completely in your power. Define yourself in terms of them and you are the enemy’s captive, whether you are in a POW camp or in the arms of the wrong person or in an environment presided over by a malevolent boss.
But you can’t say to yourself, “Okay, these things mean nothing to me. I don’t care about my lover’s attitude toward me, my health, or the state of my finances. After all, I don’t control these things.” You can’t dismiss the things you care about. You can’t eliminate your desire for them, as the Buddhists advise. You have to create a different relationship to them.
Want the things you care about, desire them, strategize to get them - but never take them seriously.
Play at getting them, play hard, play as if the game were a war game. But then, after the war, after the strategizing, learn to treat these very things you want indifferently.
To treat precious things indifferently, understand the nature of all games, even war games.
The soldier draws an analogy to a tennis game. The whole afternoon may be devoted to this tennis ball. You aim the ball here, you aim it there. You are using that external thing, that ball. But after the game is over, does anybody give a damn about the ball? Not at all. It's left behind for one of the players to pick up and put in the bottom drawer. It means nothing to anybody that's spent the afternoon playing with it.
That is how to treat things you value most - your health, your love, your prestigious job - indifferently. You play with them, fight for them - they are the tennis ball - but you don't internalize any of them. Don't count on any of them or you become their slave. Don't count on your lover's promise to always be with you. Don't expect your job to be there tomorrow. Fight for it, but be ready to put your idea of your perfect job in the bottom drawer and go on. Don't expect your poet's vision or any gift you have to be as compelling always as it is now.
"Your master," said Epictetus, "is he who controls that on which you have set your heart or wish to avoid."
♥ Everything is born in war, Heraclitus said. Babies are born in a struggle. The first tulips of spring bear leaves sharp as knives to fight their way out of the half-frozen earth. There is no shame in fighting.
♥ Great strategists have been poets, sometimes of the page, sometimes of the public act. Anna Akhmatova, the Russian poet, fought Stalin’s repressions with words, not guns or public demonstrations, though historians don’t take into account the acts of poets when they unravel the story of how wars are fought. Akhmatova kept alive the spirit and language of poetry. When people had no bread to put into their mouths, she gave them the most bewitching images. She was a sorcerer, whispering her love poems into people’s ears (it was forbidden to write them down), knowing that keeping alive the memory of human kindness was the only way for the spirit to triumph when a dictator pitted people against one another, and stole from them any semblance of humanity.
♥ They are loners. Even within their families, they consider themselves aliens, and they recognize this as power. It doesn’t embarrass them; it inspires them. Elizabeth I told herself that if she married, she would be Queen of England. But alone, she was both King and Queen. Married or not, princessas stand apart. Contemporary psychology praises the value of women’s “connection” and relationships. But the powerful women of history coveted the power of separateness. It gave them the opportunity for more than self-confidence: “self-love,” which poet Walk Whitman described in his phrase “I inhabit my soul,” was a feeling they understood. Like children and great wild cats, Freud said, powerful women seem self-contained, mysterious, and this accounts for the fascination they exert on others.
♥ A spy knows this rule of thumb: People do to others exactly what they do to themselves.
♥ Every enemy, the spy knows, is a future ally for a war that is bigger than he can see.
♥ You must love them and fight them, both at the same time. Obeying the rules is obeying their rules - and the worst thing you can do. Rules are the fiction of whoever takes the lead.
♥ Say the truth and act the truth. If you tell an opponent what he wants to hear, not what you mean, you become a manipulator - a woman who has grown content with small gains. Tell people what you think they want to hear and you ultimately convey that you are a coward at heart. They will know this about you; we give ourselves away with our smallest actions. To become a person of power, you must play true to your word.
♥ Truth is the most powerful weapon because people are too weak to resist it. Speak the truth at first and no one can hurt you. A lawyer who tells the opposition everything they want to know about her client invariably ends up winning her cases. “Half the time they don’t believe me anyway,” she says. “That totally confuses them, and they don’t know what to believe. They can’t figure out whether I’m a simpleton or a genius. So I walk into the courtroom knowing what I know. They walk in not even sure of what they know.”
♥ When you walk away or turn your back on something or someone, you give yourself a strength that is poorly understood in this culture of gratification. You strengthen yourself to come back and fight again for what you truly desire, because the “no” builds your strength. A sense of possibilities grows and so does your determination to realize them when you are prepared to walk away.
What truly sets princessas apart may be exactly this: that they say no to others but to themselves more often (and on bigger matters) than other women. Being strong about saying no to themselves means that every yes is real.