Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

Montseny’s line lands like a refusal to play the state’s favorite game: pretend a deep social wound can be cauterized with a statute. Calling prostitution a “moral, economic and social problem” is a deliberate widening of the frame. It’s not a vice to be punished, not a “public order” nuisance to be managed, but a symptom produced by poverty, gendered power, and the hypocrisies of respectable life. The punch is in the last word: “juridically.” Law, she implies, is a blunt instrument that mostly protects institutions, not people.

The intent sits in her politics. As a Spanish anarchist and, during the Second Republic, a rare woman in ministerial power, Montseny was suspicious of carceral solutions and paternalistic “rescue” schemes alike. The subtext is a critique of both camps that usually dominate the debate: moralists who criminalize sex work to enforce virtue, and reformers who regulate it to keep it tidy for men and municipalities. Either approach treats women’s bodies as terrain the state can map, license, quarantine, or erase.

She’s also signaling a harder truth: prostitution persists because it is economically functional under inequality. If survival is on the market, so is sex. You don’t legislate away desperation; you change the material conditions that make desperation predictable. In a period when modern states were expanding police powers and public-health controls, Montseny’s sentence reads like a warning: when you hand this problem to the courts, you mostly end up punishing the vulnerable and laundering the system that produced it.