Allie doesn't fear women in power—she fears what power does to anyone who holds it collectively.

The Crone collective and the female churches aren't presented as corruptions of feminist ideals; they're the inevitable architecture of those ideals at scale.

When Allie watches the matriarchal world calcify into the same surveillance, punishment, and controlled information systems the patriarchy wielded, Alderman isn't making a gender argument. She's diagnosing the exhaustion of our moment — the bone-deep belief that transformation is impossible, that the problem was never the hierarchy itself but the people inside it.

Look at how Allie experiences her own power: not as liberation but as entrapment. She builds collective structures because survival demands it, then watches those structures demand the same obedience, the same elimination of threat, the same rewriting of history that the old world required. The novel's final reveal—that male power will simply reassert itself through different machinery—isn't cynicism about patriarchy but cynicism about change itself.

Alderman designed a world where the architecture of oppression survives every revolution because oppression isn't a feature of gender but the default setting of any system that must organize bodies and resources. That pessimism maps onto something contemporary readers feel but rarely name: the suspicion that structural change is theater, that we're all just rearranging who sits at the table of domination—and The Power predicts not the future but the shape of our current paralysis.