Daily Inspiration Quote by Emma Goldman

Goldman flips the moral scoreboard: the thing Puritanism claims to eradicate is, in her telling, its crowning achievement. The line works because it treats hypocrisy not as a side effect but as the system's main output. Prostitution is "hounded, imprisoned, and chained" - a triplet of state violence that sounds less like personal vice than political category. She forces the reader to see how purity culture needs a permanent underclass to punish, parade, and keep invisible all at once.

The subtext is not that sex work is inherently liberating; it's that repression manufactures the very market it condemns. When sexuality is policed, women's economic options narrowed, and desire shoved into secrecy, prostitution becomes the pressure valve. Puritanism, in Goldman's framing, isn't just prudishness. It's an ideology that sacralizes respectability while tolerating - even depending on - a shadow economy where men can buy what society forbids them to admit wanting. "Triumph" is the knife twist: the moral crusade gets to celebrate itself through continual raids and arrests, a self-perpetuating theater of righteousness.

Context matters. Goldman was writing and speaking in an early-20th-century America of Comstock laws, vice squads, and reformers who conflated feminism with chastity. As an anarchist and feminist, she distrusted the state's "protection" of women, seeing it as discipline dressed up as concern. Her provocation insists that a society obsessed with controlling sex will always produce both the transgression and the punishment - and call that order.