Parenting & Family Quote by Margaret Sanger

A lot of ink gets spilled celebrating Margaret Sanger as a liberator; this line exposes the colder machinery that ran alongside that story: triage. She frames reproduction as a budget, with a hard cap justified by what an "average" family can afford and manage "in decent fashion". The language is clinical but moralizing. "Decent" is the tell. It's not only about money or exhaustion; it's about policing respectability, turning poverty into evidence of irresponsibility and then offering limitation as the solution.

The intent is bluntly programmatic: fewer children among wage workers, because large families are cast as an engine of misery. On one level, that's a recognizable early-20th-century reformer's concern with overcrowding, maternal health, and the brutal economics of industrial life. But the subtext is disciplinary. The "should not" isn't advice; it's a prescription delivered from above, treating working-class fertility as a social problem to be managed rather than a set of choices shaped by wages, housing, healthcare, and power.

Context matters because Sanger operated in a moment when birth control advocacy and eugenic thinking frequently shared a room, sometimes sharing a script. Even when the motive is framed as compassion for working women, the argument quietly shifts the burden from employers and the state onto the bodies of the poor. It's a politics of constraint dressed as care: reduce the number of mouths, and the system doesn't have to change how it feeds them.