Motherhood Quote by Margaret Sanger

Freedom, in Sanger's hands, is stripped of its patriotic pageantry and reduced to a blunt physical fact: who gets to decide what happens to a woman's body. The line works because it refuses the comforting, abstract version of liberty. "Call herself free" is a challenge and a trap; it implies that society will happily grant women ceremonial freedoms so long as reproductive control remains out of reach. Sanger turns autonomy into a litmus test, not a vibe.

The repetition is doing quiet, deliberate work. By doubling the structure, she makes bodily control and conscious motherhood inseparable. "Own and control" sounds like property law on purpose, borrowing the language of rights that men were already recognized to have. It's also a rebuke to institutions - churches, doctors, lawmakers, employers, husbands - that treated pregnancy as fate or moral punishment rather than a decision with material consequences.

Context matters because Sanger wasn't speaking into a neutral debate. She was operating in an America where contraception information was criminalized under Comstock laws and where working-class women bore the heaviest costs of "unplanned" motherhood: poverty, medical risk, curtailed education and work, and intimate coercion. The quote's urgency comes from that lived calculus.

The subtext is harsher: without reproductive choice, every other promise - voting, wages, public voice - is conditional. You're "free" until your biology is commandeered. That makes the claim bracingly modern, even as Sanger's broader legacy is complicated by the era's coercive eugenic currents, a reminder that liberation rhetoric can coexist with exclusionary politics.