Motherhood Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman doesn’t just pick a fight with “morality.” She stages a public autopsy of it, dragging the most sentimental idol of her era - motherhood - into the harsh light and asking who bleeds for the virtue everyone applauds. The line is designed to scandalize, because scandal is the point: if motherhood is treated as “sacred,” it becomes untouchable, and anything untouchable can be used as a weapon.

Her phrasing is theatrical but surgical. “Morality and its victim” flips the expected casting. Morality isn’t the guardian of women; it’s the thing done to them. “Glorified sacred function” skewers the sugar coating: praise becomes a leash. The subtext is that reverence can be a form of coercion, converting women’s bodies into civic infrastructure - producing citizens, stabilizing men, laundering social anxieties - while calling it honor.

Context matters. Goldman is writing and speaking in a world where women’s autonomy is policed through marriage law, economic dependence, and forced pregnancy, with contraception and abortion criminalized and “respectability” deployed as social surveillance. Her anarchism makes the critique sharper: she’s not asking for a kinder moral order, she’s questioning the legitimacy of an order that needs women’s self-erasure to function.

The provocation - “more terrible, more criminal” - isn’t anti-motherhood. It’s anti-myth. Goldman is targeting a culture that sanctifies motherhood precisely to keep mothers from naming their exhaustion, their rage, their desire, and their right to choose. When society calls a role holy, it often means it wants you to do it without complaint, without pay, and without exit.