Life & Wisdom Quote by Marge Piercy

Piercy takes a domestic image that’s usually treated as background noise - the doorway, the threshold, the place you pass through without thinking - and turns it into a political organ. Calling doorways “sacred” isn’t decorative spirituality; it’s a claim of jurisdiction. Thresholds are where rules apply: who gets welcomed, who gets turned away, what’s allowed to cross from public to private. By mapping that onto women’s bodies (“we are the doorways of life”), Piercy collapses architecture into anatomy and makes the home and the womb part of the same contested border.

The intent is bluntly corrective. Women are often cast as spaces to be entered, used, occupied: the room, the house, the body. Piercy flips the grammar. The doorway isn’t a passive opening; it’s a site of choice, a mechanism with a lock. “We must choose what comes in and what goes out” reads like a mantra of consent, but it also widens into a broader ethic of boundaries: lovers, violence, ideology, labor, expectations. The “must” matters; autonomy here isn’t a vibe, it’s a duty, born from the costs of being treated as permeable.

Contextually, Piercy’s work emerges from second-wave feminism’s insistence that private life is political. This line carries that inheritance while anticipating later conversations about bodily autonomy and gatekeeping as survival. It works because it refuses abstraction: instead of arguing, it gives you a threshold and asks who has been allowed to stand there with the keys.