Daily Inspiration Quote by Robin Morgan

Freedom, here, isn`t a private possession; it`s a social pathogen. Robin Morgan`s line grabs because it flips the usual fearmongering around contagion. Power has always talked about dissent as if it were an illness spreading through the body politic. Morgan repurposes that metaphor with activist relish: yes, it spreads, and that`s precisely the point.

The intent is mobilizing, but not in the bland, poster-slogan way. "Demanding" does the heavy lifting. It`s not asking, not pleading, not waiting for institutions to develop a conscience. It implies confrontation, a refusal to accept freedom as a grant handed down by the state, a boss, a husband, a gatekeeper. The subtext is that liberation is learned behavior. People don`t just wake up free; they watch someone else risk consequences, and suddenly the risk looks survivable. Courage becomes copyable.

As a second-wave feminist and a major voice in women`s liberation, Morgan is writing from a context where the personal was being dragged - deliberately - into the political arena: reproductive autonomy, workplace equality, sexual violence, the right to name one`s own life. Those fights weren`t won by solitary enlightenment; they depended on public acts that made silence untenable. "Contagious" also hints at the anxiety movements trigger: once one group insists on full personhood, others realize how many of their own constraints were normalized as "just the way things are". The line works because it compresses movement strategy into a single image: freedom spreads when it`s performed, not merely believed.