"Only mothers can think of the future - because they give birth to it in their children"
About this Quote
Gorky turns motherhood into a kind of political technology: the one group supposedly licensed to imagine tomorrow because they literally manufacture it. The line flatters mothers, yes, but it also drafts them into a moral economy where the future is not an abstract idea or a utopian blueprint. Its raw material is children, bodies, hunger, schooling, survival. That concreteness is why the metaphor lands. It drags “the future” down from manifesto-speak and pins it to the domestic sphere, where time is measured in feeding schedules and growth spurts, not slogans.
The subtext is sharper than the sentiment suggests. By implying that others can’t truly think ahead, Gorky quietly indicts a society run by men who talk about progress while treating actual lives as expendable. In early 20th-century Russia, “future” was a contested word, claimed by revolutionaries, reformers, and propagandists alike. Gorky, sympathetic to radical change but wary of cruelty dressed up as necessity, often insisted that any promised dawn had to answer for its human cost. Mothers become his ethical check: they can’t afford fantasies that require sacrificing a generation, because that generation is in their arms.
It’s also a strategic sentimentalism. Elevating mothers grants them authority without explicitly demanding power, an old move in cultures that revere maternal sacrifice while limiting women’s autonomy. The quote comforts and conscripts at once: it honors care as foresight, then leverages that care as a mandate to judge the present. In Gorky’s hands, motherhood isn’t merely private virtue; it’s a rebuke to politics that treats the future as a speech, not a child.
The subtext is sharper than the sentiment suggests. By implying that others can’t truly think ahead, Gorky quietly indicts a society run by men who talk about progress while treating actual lives as expendable. In early 20th-century Russia, “future” was a contested word, claimed by revolutionaries, reformers, and propagandists alike. Gorky, sympathetic to radical change but wary of cruelty dressed up as necessity, often insisted that any promised dawn had to answer for its human cost. Mothers become his ethical check: they can’t afford fantasies that require sacrificing a generation, because that generation is in their arms.
It’s also a strategic sentimentalism. Elevating mothers grants them authority without explicitly demanding power, an old move in cultures that revere maternal sacrifice while limiting women’s autonomy. The quote comforts and conscripts at once: it honors care as foresight, then leverages that care as a mandate to judge the present. In Gorky’s hands, motherhood isn’t merely private virtue; it’s a rebuke to politics that treats the future as a speech, not a child.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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