#anti shield founders
A strong man who has known power all his life may lose respect for that power, but a weak man knows the value of strength.
There are a lot of character defining lines for Steve, but this little one liner gets buried by the “I can do this all day” and “the little guy from Brooklyn who didn’t know how to run away from a fight”.
It’s what sets Steve apart from most of the other superheroes: he didn’t have a PhD, he didn’t have millions/billions under his name, he wasn’t a god. He wasn’t even someone you could call young and healthy. Erskine tells him he was chosen - not because he didn’t have those luxuries - but because he knew what it meant to be deprived of things ordinary people take for granted.
And it is this fact that makes his catchphrase so much more meaningful. It isn’t easy for pre-serum Steve to do what he does, to stand up, to speak out, to then grit his teeth and bear the consequences of taking a stance; but nevertheless, he will do it because it was that important to give the weak and the disadvantaged a voice.
All of this is important in his arc. He never lost perspective on what strength and power means. By knowing what it feels to be on the receiving end, Steve remains always wary about what absolute strength would mean. “This isn’t freedom, it’s fear.” “Sounds like a cold world, Tony.” “It’s run by people with agendas, and agendas change.” This is why Steve has always fought for individual responsibility, and against giving power to big institutions who have, in his experience, always walked over the weakest in society.
And this is why, unless they give Carter the same backstory of poor health, racial discrimination, being orphaned and poverty, it’s an insult to suggest she is morally equivalent to Steve, because as it stands with her backstory in AC, she has known power her whole life and none of her actions in the MCU have suggested she knows the value of the strength she gains through her organisation. To have her say “I can do this all day” is a mockery to what that phrase means to that skinny little kid in a back alley who chose battles bigger than himself, because it was important to teach people who are born with that strength to fear the very people they dismiss as weak.
And this is why Steve is the people’s hero.
Lack of strength doesn’t always have to be the physical kind. Peggy is strong and capable physically, but she was also a woman in the 1940’s. It wasn’t common for women to have careers of their own back then. And she was only “accepted” into the army because it was wartime. She was deemed unqualified and weak until she could prove herself, just like Steve was. Steve was a scrawny kid during war and Peggy was a career driven woman in the 50’s. Neither of those combinations gave you anything for free. She also knew Steve, she might have adopted the frase “I can do this all day” from him, as a way to have him with her. In my opinion, Peggy is an awesome superhero and I hope I get to see more of her in the future
I’m not saying that Peggy wouldn’t have faced misogyny, but she was more privileged than Steve (Peggy is white, English, wealthy, able, and is. while Steve was the son of Irish immigrants and grew up disabled during the eugenics movement)
And considering that Peggy, Howard, and colonel Phillips founded a government agency together, which she became the leader of, misogyny can’t have stopped her that much. There is also the fact that they hired at least 1 nazi scientist (Zola) into their organization while fully knowing that Zola had tortured 1 of their former coworkers and that said coworker had died when capturing Zola. And them hiring Zola enabled him to rebuild hydra and torture Bucky into the Winter Soldier. We also see that at least Howard knew about Bucky, so unless Peggy was completely incompetent, she would have known too.
Then we have the massive red abuse flags she showed with how she treated Steve. The most obvious example has to be when she shot at him because he was kissed (without consent, so SA) by another woman while they weren’t even together (obviously, it still wouldn’t have been ok if they were together).
You can like Peggy, but she has a lot of massive flaws and has done horrific things (the 2 above are just the most glaring examples) that keeps getting ignored in favor of portraying her as a ‘feminist badass’(the toxic white version of feminism to be more accurate)
