Most people think about power in terms of powerful people, powerful institutions, or instances of control over others. However, social movements demonstrate that power relations can operate differently. Under some circumstances, unexpected groups of people who have been under the control of others, and perhaps had accepted the authority of others as legitimate, resist and take action on their own behalf. These occasions reveal the socially constructed myth that creates the basis for authority and control. Feminist activist Barbara Demming (1974, 8-9) argued that:

We act out respect for ourselves by refusing to cooperate with those who oppress or exploit us. And as their power never resides in their single selves, always depends upon the cooperation of others-by refusing that cooperation, refusing our labor, our wits, our money, or blood upon their battlefields, our deference, we take their power away from them.