Women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open.

The line is a blunt rejection of the patriarchal expectation that “good” women should be silent in public life (“mouths shut”) while remaining perpetually available for reproduction (“wombs open”). Attributed to Emma Goldman, it encapsulates themes central to her feminism: women’s freedom of speech, sexual autonomy, and resistance to compulsory motherhood. The phrasing compresses a broader critique of social and legal controls—marriage conventions, moral policing, and restrictions on contraception—that reduce women to compliant domestic and reproductive roles. Its shock value functions rhetorically, forcing attention to how “respectability” can mask coercion and how liberation requires both voice and bodily self-determination.