Women should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children...If a woman grows weary and, at last, dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die from bearing - she is there to do it.
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"If a woman grows weary and at last dies from childbearing, it matters not. Let her die in childbearing—she is there to do it."
"Their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught, should be taken from them."
"Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has."
"God hides in order not to be found where humans want to find God. But God also hides in order to be found where God wills to be found."
"The word and work of God is quite clear, namely, that women were made to be either wives or prostitutes."
German theologian whose 95 Theses (1517) launched the Protestant Reformation and broke the Catholic Church's monopoly on Western Christianity. Closely associated with Philipp Melanchthon (Lutheran systematizer) and John Calvin (later Reformer who built on Luther's break). For an intellectual contrast, see Pope Leo X, Renaissance pope (1513-1521) — Leo X's indulgence sales triggered Luther's break and Leo excommunicated him in 1521 — Luther's entire Reformation is structured as a direct answer to the indulgence-funded Vatican Leo represented.
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Luther states that a woman's proper role is confined to the household: managing the home and producing children. He goes further, declaring that if childbirth kills her, that outcome is acceptable because bearing children is literally her purpose. The quote frames women as instruments of reproduction whose lives are expendable in service of that function, denying them value beyond domestic and maternal duty.
Luther, an Augustinian monk who married former nun Katharina von Bora in 1525 and fathered six children, preached extensively on marriage and household order. While he elevated marriage over celibacy—a radical break from Catholic monasticism—he anchored it in rigid patriarchal hierarchy drawn from his reading of Genesis and Paul. His "table talk" and sermons repeatedly cast wifely submission and fertility as divine mandates, shaping Protestant domestic theology for centuries.
In early-modern Europe, childbirth killed roughly one in forty mothers per delivery, and women averaged seven or more pregnancies. The Reformation dissolved convents, eliminating the main alternative to marriage for women and funneling them into household roles. Legal codes treated wives as husbands' property, and theological debates over Eve's guilt reinforced female subordination. Luther's words reflected—and helped cement—a Protestant social order built on compulsory marriage, large families, and women's civic invisibility.
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