Motherhood Quote by Margaret Sanger

Dire poverty is doing the verb in Sanger's sentence; the mother is almost grammatically erased. That choice isn’t accidental. It reframes factory labor not as a moral test or a character-building rite, but as coercion with a time clock. The parenthetical jab, "(no intelligent person will say she goes willingly)", is Sanger at her most prosecutorial: she anticipates the smug rebuttal - that workers choose their lot, that hardship is a preference masquerading as necessity - and she disqualifies it in advance. Intelligence becomes a litmus test for empathy.

The line lands in the early 20th-century industrial economy, when women’s wages were low, hours were brutal, and childbirth could mean a rapid return to work because there was no cushion: no paid leave, no reliable welfare state, often no partner income you could trust. Sanger, who built her activism around birth control and women’s autonomy, is tightening the causal chain between reproduction and exploitation. If poverty drags a mother back to the factory, then "choice" is a fantasy unless you can control when you become a mother in the first place.

Subtextually, it’s also a strategic rebuke to sentimental reform. She isn’t asking for pity; she’s arguing that the system profits from women having fewer real options than the rhetoric of freedom suggests. The factory isn’t just a workplace here. It’s an institution that converts private need - feeding children - into public compliance. The parenthesis is the sting: if you call this willing, you’re not just wrong; you’re willfully blind.