"Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance"
About this Quote
Praise here isn’t a pat on the head; it’s a demand for historical memory. Piercy writes like someone refusing the comforting myth that rights simply “arrive.” Every “doorway open” is framed as seized territory, not granted access, and the phrase “squads of fighting women” deliberately militarizes the past. It’s a corrective to the polite version of progress, where struggle gets smoothed into inspirational wallpaper.
The most electric move is the pivot from public thresholds to the body: “Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life.” Piercy weaponizes a metaphor often used to romanticize or control women and flips it into sovereignty. The doorway isn’t sentiment; it’s jurisdiction. “We must choose what comes in and what goes out” reads as a blunt claim to sexual autonomy and reproductive choice, but also to psychic and political boundaries: what ideologies enter, what obligations are refused, what forms of labor and caretaking are no longer assumed.
The repeated accounting of costs - “wombs, sleep, lives” - is intentionally unsparing. It drags the reader away from celebratory feminism into intergenerational debt, insisting that freedom is built on exhaustion and risk that were disproportionately borne by women. That’s the subtextual warning: if we forget the price, we’ll accept the rollback.
“Freedom is our real abundance” lands as both ethos and rebuke. Not happiness, not protection, not even opportunity - freedom. Piercy writes from a late-20th-century feminist lineage where the stakes are bodily, material, and collective, and the tone makes clear that gratitude is not passive; it’s a call to keep the doors defended.
The most electric move is the pivot from public thresholds to the body: “Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life.” Piercy weaponizes a metaphor often used to romanticize or control women and flips it into sovereignty. The doorway isn’t sentiment; it’s jurisdiction. “We must choose what comes in and what goes out” reads as a blunt claim to sexual autonomy and reproductive choice, but also to psychic and political boundaries: what ideologies enter, what obligations are refused, what forms of labor and caretaking are no longer assumed.
The repeated accounting of costs - “wombs, sleep, lives” - is intentionally unsparing. It drags the reader away from celebratory feminism into intergenerational debt, insisting that freedom is built on exhaustion and risk that were disproportionately borne by women. That’s the subtextual warning: if we forget the price, we’ll accept the rollback.
“Freedom is our real abundance” lands as both ethos and rebuke. Not happiness, not protection, not even opportunity - freedom. Piercy writes from a late-20th-century feminist lineage where the stakes are bodily, material, and collective, and the tone makes clear that gratitude is not passive; it’s a call to keep the doors defended.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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