Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Sanger

Sanger is doing something sneakier than advocating for pleasure: she is re-engineering the moral vocabulary of sex so women can claim authority over it without having to apologize. The phrase "mutual and satisfied" reads like a contract clause, not a blushy confession. In the early 20th century, when respectable discourse treated female desire as either nonexistent or pathological, framing a woman's sexual satisfaction as "health giving" is a tactical jailbreak. She smuggles consent into a culture that barely had the word by wrapping it in the era's trusted currency: hygiene, vitality, medicine.

That medical register also exposes the subtext. Calling sex "magnetism" borrows the language of natural forces, implying desire is not a vice but a bodily signal with consequences. It's an argument designed to disarm: if pleasure is health, then denying it is harm; if responsiveness matters, then coercion isn't just immoral, it's irrational. The second sentence lands with controlled severity. "When it is not desired... it should not take place" is not romantic; it's legislative. Sanger positions the woman's interior state - desire, response - as the deciding evidence, an audacious move in a time when marital duty often trumped personal will.

Context matters: Sanger's activism around birth control was about economic survival, maternal health, and women's autonomy in a system that made pregnancy a recurring sentence. This quote extends that project from reproduction to intimacy. It insists that sex isn't merely what happens to women; it's something women authorize. The radicalism isn't the eroticism. It's the veto.