Morality and its victim, the mother - what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood?

Goldman is attacking the moral ideology that sanctifies motherhood while ignoring (or even requiring) women’s suffering. By calling the mother “morality’s victim,” she suggests that social and religious codes—especially those governing sexuality, marriage, and “female duty”—turn reproduction into an obligation rather than a freely chosen relationship. The “terrible picture” is the contrast between public reverence for motherhood and the private realities of coercion, poverty, exhaustion, and curtailed autonomy. Her rhetorical question (“anything more terrible, more criminal…?”) frames enforced or idealized motherhood as a form of social violence: a revered institution that can function as a mechanism of control over women’s bodies and lives.