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More "Motherhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nothing to do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a desire exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical motherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But that she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands; leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth open a little longer and ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the possibility of motherhood. Realizing this fact, one cannot fail to have a high idea of this function. Most girls, naturally, desire children. Little girls love their doll babies, and spend much time in caring for them, but as girls grow into womanhood they desire real babies. A woman who does not desire children ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... guardians of the race, and every normal woman desires children. Children are not a handicap in the race of life either, they are an inspiration. We hear too much about the burden of motherhood and too little of its benefits. The average child does well for his parents, and teaches them many things. Bless his little soft hands—he broadens our outlook, quickens our sympathies, and leads us, if we will but let him, into all truth. A child ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... I ever saw a gipsy who had grown fat. In Germany the gipsy women are often very pretty; but beauty is very uncommon among the Spanish gitanas. When very young, they may pass as being attractive in their ugliness, but once they have reached motherhood, they become absolutely repulsive. The filthiness of both sexes is incredible, and no one who has not seen a gipsy matron's hair can form any conception of what it is, not even if he conjures up the roughest, ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... personal charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway. Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... utmost to snare men, and failed. Of such sort are the majority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigid limitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who run no more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so many mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such noisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract the attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises that are difficult or forbidden. But certainly ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... is the wisest, sweetest, most triumphant mother I have ever known. I am restrained by feelings of deepest reverence for her from speaking, as I might speak, of the rare and tender methods by which her motherhood has worked, patiently and alone, for nearly twenty years, and made of her two sons "lovers and friends." I have always felt that she owed it to the world to impart to other mothers all that she could of her divine secret; to write out, even in detail, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... in the world is associated with it. For it was there that the young bride Mary visited her older cousin Elizabeth,—you remember the exquisite picture of the "Visitation" by Albertinelli in the Uffizi at Florence,—and the joy of coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and expectant soul of such a woman as Mary, ready to welcome ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... sentimentality, as far as I can see, to argue against special legislation for women. What women can do intellectually as compared with men I am in no position to state. To argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities, feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... have twitted him with never having produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model for him. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the more earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our village with the eyes ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... presence seemed to diffuse itself through the house. There was a sense of confusion and unrest, and the loud crying of a hungry baby determined to be attended to. And Joanna was fulfilling this duty, when Katherine hastened to meet her. Wifehood and motherhood had greatly altered the slim, fair girl of ten years before. She had grown stout, and was untidy in her dress, and a worried, anxious expression was continually on her countenance. Batavius kept an eye on the children; ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... nature; she demanded all the treasures of the heart, all the resources of strength; she filled his life and gave the zest of a conflict to happiness; whereas Amelie, chaste and confiding, would settle down into the sphere of peaceful motherhood, where the commonplace must be its poetry, and where my mind would find no ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... names. Bessie declared herself delighted with the chance of seeing Lady Ivinghoe, whom she considered more to realise the beauty of women than any one she had hitherto beheld, and the fair face had not lost its simplicity, but rather gained in loveliness by the sweetness of early motherhood, as she and Phyllis sat by Mysie, regaling her with tales of what they regarded as the remarkable precocity of the infant Claude, reluctantly left ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... has not the power of calling spirits out of the unknown into this earth life been intrusted to weak and sickly women? What the world loosely calls spiritualism is no isolated phenomenon or set of phenomena. The universe is spiritual. Much as we claim for our mediums, the mediumship of motherhood is far more marvellous. Our mediums can enable spirits already alive, and able by their own wills to cooperate, to pass before our eyes for a moment. To hold them longer in our view exceeds their power. But these ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... indescribable quality of womanliness—that quality which men have ever praised and ever will praise. Those noble words of Judge Sewall at the open grave of his mother are an epitome of the patience, the love, the sacrifice, and the nobility of motherhood: "Jany. 4th, 1700-1.... Nathan Bricket taking in hand to fill the grave, I said, Forbear a little, and suffer me to say that amidst our bereaving sorrows we have the comfort of beholding this saint put into the rightful possession of that happiness ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and motherhood. But she had gathered all these marvelous things to her ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the beauty of the Christ Child, The gentleness, the grace, The smiling, loving tenderness, The infantile embrace! All babyhood he holdeth, All motherhood enfoldeth— Yet who ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... sterile were that soil Save as you planted. (Though in the Book we read One woman bore a child with no man's aid, We find no record of a man-child born Without the aid of woman! Fatherhood Is but a small achievement at the best, While motherhood comprises heaven and hell.) This ever-growing argument of sex Is most unseemly, and devoid of sense. Why waste more time in controversy, when There is not time enough for all of love, Our rightful occupation in this life? Why prate of our defects, of ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... proud of the somewhat rounded form of her waist. All women display an innocent artfulness, the first time they find themselves facing motherhood. Like a soldier who makes a brilliant toilet for his first battle, they love to play the pale, the suffering; they rise in a certain manner, and walk with the prettiest affectation. While yet flowers, they bear a fruit; they enjoy their maternity by anticipation. All those little ways ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... out of the intolerable position in which I had placed myself. I was in very bad health for a time, and my husband's affection for the alien child was more than I was able to bear. There is always a touch of the savage in motherhood, and I ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Thackeray's novels Vanity Fair is the best known and most popular. It is a remarkable picture of a thoroughly hard, selfish woman whom even motherhood did not soften; but it is something more than the chronicle of Becky Sharp's fortunes. It is a panoramic sketch of many phases of London life; it is the free giving out by a great master of fiction of his impressions of life. Hence Vanity Fair alone is worth a hundred books filled merely with exciting ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... of the splendid motherhood that, in her sons, has contributed such wealth of manhood to the race. And, in her daughter, has given to human-kind such riches of womanhood. With kindest ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... the birth of a little daughter. The child was the idol of her father, and Penny's life was brightened by the joys of motherhood, in spite of the persistent refusal of Stephen Dale to hold any communication with her or allow ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... it produces pigmies. It needs men to fight; it produces men to run. It needs women with minds broad enough to think and hearts large enough to love. It needs motherhood that, while it bends protectingly over the cradle of its own child, reaches out a mother-heart to all the suffering childhood of the race. It needs the capacity for heroism; it yields the tendency to cowardice. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Carinthia Jane. She was her old father's pet; but Countess Fanny gloried in the boy. She had fancied she would be a childless woman before he gave sign of coming; and they say she wrote a little volume of Meditations in Prospect of Approaching Motherhood, for the guidance of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... as they had left the creche he began to speak of the horror the babies in their incubating cases had caused him. "Is motherhood gone?" he said. "Was it a cant? Surely it was an instinct. This ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... Arkel; "her eyes are full of tears. It is her soul, now, that weeps. Why does she stretch her arms out so?—what does she wish?" "Toward her child, without doubt," answers the physician. "It is the struggle of motherhood against...." "At this moment?—At once?" cries Golaud, in a renewed outburst of anguish.... "Oh, oh! I must speak to her! Melisande! Melisande!—leave me alone with her!" "Trouble her not," gravely ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... floor, and stared in front of her.... Out of the dim past, almost as dim to her as to an animal, came a memory, the memory of a touch. The touch of a baby's hands feeling about her breast.... Not of Ishmael's in particular—how should she, whose motherhood had been so forced, so blurred a thing, keep one memory of it from another, or any that was not purely animal ...? But it was his picture she had been looking at which had brought the idea of babyhood back to her, and it was with him personally ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Peace—a study The Arab Lines on Hearing the Organ Changed First Love Wanderers Sad Memories Companions Ballad Precious Stones Disaster Contentment The Schoolmaster Arcades Ambo Waiting Play Love Thoughts at a Railway Station On the Brink "Forever" Under the Trees Motherhood Mystery Flight On the Beach Lovers, and a Reflection The Cock and the Bull An ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual is a ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... entirely without the sentiment which her son felt regarding the physical function of motherhood, for like the majority of sentiments, it had worn thin when it had been stretched over a continual repetition of facts. To Abel the mystery was still shrouded in a veil of sympathy, and was hardly to be thought of without tenderness. But his solicitude merely nettled Sarah. Nobody had ever "carried ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... worried. "Now I am unhappy!" he ejaculated. "What provokers to the wrong way are women! Her mother was like her—my beloved Adriana!" And his old eyes filled with sorrowful tears as he recalled the daughter he had lost in the first days of her motherhood. Very soon Sunna and Adriana became one and he was ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... moment the God you do not serve, and then for a moment the mammon you do serve. The God you do not serve is the Father of Lights, the Source of love, the Maker of man and woman, the Head of the great family, the Father of fatherhood and motherhood; the Life-giver who would die to preserve His children, but would rather slay them than they should live the servants of evil; the God who can neither think nor do nor endure any thing mean or unfair; the God of poetry and music and every marvel; the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... are three things sacred above all others: the first is motherhood; the second marriage; the third is ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... impossible to train personality and character. The father felt no responsibility for children that were not really his but his master's. The mother merely discharged the animal functions of bearing and rearing the child, all the finer instincts of motherhood being prostituted to a selfish commercial end. The slave-mother, of course, did not feel the pathos of the situation when pointing to her children she said: "Look missis! little niggers for you and massa; plenty little niggers for you and little missis." ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... each sister land, patient and cheerily wise, With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes, Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood, Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... summed up in this verity: 'It is a mother's duty to nurse her child.' And, besides, a mother, is she not the symbol of all grandeur, all strength, all beauty? She represents the eternity of life. She deserves a social culture, she should be religiously venerated. When we know how to worship motherhood, our country will be saved. And this is why, my friend, I should like a mother feeding her babe to be adopted as the highest expression of human beauty. Ah! how can one persuade our Parisiennes, all our French women, indeed, that woman's beauty lies in being a mother with an infant on her knees? ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... be succinctly stated—"the bride of three nights was not enceinte! Had she only possessed the attributes of coming motherhood, Lucrezia's origin might have been condoned. But surely it was foul cruelty which fixed the fault on her alone. As it was, the poor young Duchess was accorded at her husband's court the position of a ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... one she cried herself to sleep, craving the touch of the little rosebud baby learning of motherhood from ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... across her troublesome, disconnected thoughts. Mrs. Otway never heard those chimes without a wave of remembrance, sometimes very slight, sometimes like to-day quite strong and insistent, of past joys and sorrows. Those bells were interwoven with the whole of her wifehood, motherhood, and widowhood; they had rung for her wedding, they had mustered the tiny congregation who had been present at Rose's christening; the great bell had tolled the day her husband had died, and again to bid the kindly folk of Witanbury to ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for the happiness she had once received from him. Oh! you need not be astonished at so horrible a conspiracy; it frequently takes place. Many women are more lovers than mothers, though the majority are more mothers than wives. The two sentiments, love and motherhood, developed as they are by our manners and customs, often struggle together in the hearts of women; one or other must succumb when they are not of equal strength; when they are, they produce some exceptional women, the glory of our sex. A man of your genius must surely comprehend many things ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... the times to come—serenity restored. For the moment the woman was forgetful of the foreshadowed days, happy that the warm, pulsing little body of her son lay unshrinking in her arms: so conscious of his love and life—so wishful for a deeper sense of motherhood—that she slipped her hand under his jacket and felt about for his heart, and there let her fingers lie, within touch of its steady beating. The lights still twinkled and flashed and aimlessly wandered in the night; but the spell of the river ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... again, a deep and sacred meaning in her words. Within her stirred the universal motherhood, the hope of everything, the call of the unborn, the insistent voice of the race that was ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... disturbed her, though she took no particular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy to think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge of the Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents in Italy, she had had to pass through such an arduous apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to remember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at times they were like an army with banners, and their power of self-multiplication ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... are noble, true, and chivalrous, you will not allow the sweet impulses of young and tender womanhood to be punished with the ban of felony. To you, women of France, I appeal in the name of your childhood, your girlhood, your motherhood; take her to your hearts, she is worthy of it, worthier now for having blushed before you, worthier than any heroine in the great roll of honour ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the parted soul, They have thanked the slender dole, And spoken of hope of days to come, And have forgotten their martyrdom. The anguished grief of motherhood Has firmly whispered "God is good And can in His Eternity Repay this present loss"; till I Have almost turned my head to see If Christ has ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... give you—all unasked you went, Sons of a greater motherhood than ours; To our proud hearts your young brief lives were lent, Then swept beyond us by resistless powers. Only we hear, when we have lost our all, That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... stood there, reckless and daring, and absolutely fearless through her motherhood, there was a quick flash, another report, and the mother chamois, the pretty wife of Chaffer, of whom he had been so proud, dropped over the body of her baby and mingled her blood with his. She died quicker than Chaffer, ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... center of the first panel, as the symbol of worldly motive. Here, too, are primitive man and woman, bearing their burdens, symbolized by their progeny, into the unknown future, ready to meet whatever be the call of earth. The woman suggests the overwhelming instincts of motherhood. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... a pensive frame of mind this morning. Two days before she had read a paper at the Institute on "Motherhood," which had been enthusiastically received. Mrs. Earle had printed a flattering item concerning it in the Benham Sentinel. It was agreeable to her to be going to meet Littleton, for he was the most interesting masculine figure in her life. She was sure of Lewis. He was her husband ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... in the conspiracy. Supposedly, they were keeping the young in a blessed state of innocence. As a matter of fact, other agencies were busy disseminating falsehoods. Most of our boys and girls, having no opportunity to hear sex and marriage and motherhood discussed with reverence, heard these matters discussed with vulgarity. While those interested in the welfare of the young withheld the truth, those who could profit by their downfall poisoned their minds with error ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... when the first evidences of motherhood manifest themselves, the husband procures a white or black chicken and after inviting a few friends, holds an informal party in honor of the occasion. I know of one case in which the ritual waving ceremony[1] took place on pregnancy, but ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of those American matrons who do not allow marriage and motherhood to make vulgar physical impressions upon them. Her pale blue gown might have been worn by her daughter; her cool grey eyes looked out through a face without a wrinkle from a soul without a care. She was a patroness of art and intellect; but never did she forget her fundamental duty, the enhancing ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... city and bring out the women by the thousands. It would be the uprising of the women; the first upward step from sheer wage-slavery; the first advance toward the ideal of that coming woman, who should be a man in her freedom and her strength and her power, and yet woman of woman in her love and her motherhood and wife-hood. Industry, so Sally knew, was taking the young girls by the million, overworking them, sapping them of body and soul, and casting them out unfit to bear children, untrained to keep house, undisciplined to meet life and to be a comrade of a man. And Sally knew, moreover, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... composer of the "Rex tremendae" (in the Requiem) wrote "Dove sono," Beethoven wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb" and "Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... think so sometimes.... We women, who are born capable of motherhood, seem to be fashioned also to realise Christ more clearly—and the holy mother who bore him.... I don't know if that's the reason—or if, truly, in us a little flame burns more constantly—the passion which instinctively flames more brightly toward ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... turn of mind should have induced her to enter a convent. Locks of soft golden hair escaped from her hood, intended to grow into long tresses, but she had allowed her hair to be cut. An ideal young mother, she seemed to Evelyn to be; and the thought of motherhood was put into Evelyn's mind by the story Angela was telling, for her counterpart had been drowned in Noah's deluge when he was four ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... that had never been realized. He was thinking that Margaret Gilbert was a fortunate and happy woman to have become Mother Carey; such a mother, too, that all about her was a wide, wide space, and next the space, the rest of the world, nearer or farther according to their merits. He wondered if motherhood ought not to be like that, and he thought if it were it would be a ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... had long since been submerged in an immeasurable motherhood and the best of cooks, would do the little thinking the house required, take charge of the old man's earnings, pay the rent and the burial club, and scheme little savings against Jenny's marriage—which she kept, not in an old stocking, but in a precious teapot of some old-fashioned ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... after all, savage doesn't mean anything but wild, untamed. You're that, you know, old lady. Untamed even by motherhood. And I'd have thought that would have tamed even Petruchio's handful. But this Maori woman I was thinking about was in the King Country in New Zealand—You know, I'd read 'The Blue Lagoon' and thought it ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... inculcated, will not avail much unless they are to some extent practised in the home. And this will never be the case so long as women are demoralised by the hard conditions of industrial life, and unfitted for the duties of motherhood ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... movies with their morbid emphasis on problems and crime and sex in preference to the cleancut American product which always satisfied the nobler feelings by showing the reward of the honest, the downfall of evildoers and the purity of love and motherhood. Art is all very well, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... she cried aloud. "I drink to ourselves, to women, to the gentle, to the homely, to happiness and purity! To motherhood! I drink to the sacred—" she broke off abruptly, sat down and hung ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the two peoples and the similarity of their civilizations, was our rival by necessity, our ill-wisher because of the past. The idea that we were bound to the mother country by ties of gratitude or affection he always combated. He denied her motherhood as a historical proposition, and demanded to know of Senator Butler, of South Carolina, who was moved to eloquence over America's debt to England for a language and a literature, whether he was duly grateful also for English criticism of our ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age—all this she knit into the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put their ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... understood The frequent joys of motherhood— To lick, from pointed tail to nape, The mewing litter into shape; To show, with pride that condescends, Your offspring to your human friends, And all our sympathy to win For every kit tucked ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... highest function, and, moreover, it is a function which it is unwise not to exercise; for it is infinitely more perilous for a healthy woman not to be a mother than it is for her to bear children. Motherhood, too, is the most markedly indicated function of a woman's body. She is specialized for it; it is the thing indicated. And yet we never say to a woman, Be a mother when you will; we hold up our hands in horror at the very thought of motherhood ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. "She is a queen of mothers!" she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. "I love her perfect love for you—for me, even! She is above all jealousy. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... Daily intercourse with a couple of hundred little street Arabs furnished a field for the practice of considerable feminine virtue, and in reality the woman's kingdom at the top of the broad wooden steps was a great 'culture engine' of spiritual motherhood. ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... charge for the rights of motherhood among the wealthy indifferent, and from a most important viewpoint. Price . . . . . ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette's face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove's voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard," she thought. "All my pride would run out to ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... strengthened by cruel trials, was far indeed from the common run, and men did justice to it. Such a soul necessarily required a lofty passion; and the affections of Madame de Dey were concentrated on a single sentiment,—that of motherhood. The happiness and pleasure of which her married life was deprived, she found in the passionate love she bore her son. She loved him not only with the pure and deep devotion of a mother, but with the coquetry ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac
... my business and delight now—but you will soon have to do for others what I am doing for you. You like this easy life at present, but you can hardly imagine how interesting it is to have some one given you for your own, as you were given to me. It is the delight of motherhood and fatherhood in one; and when I was allowed to take you away out of the room where you lay—I admit it was not a pleasant scene—I felt just like a child who is given a ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... have been unwilling to teach school children the evils of violating sex hygiene, we have been unsuccessful in combating evils justly attributable to ignorance on the part of girls as to the duties and dangers of motherhood." This point of view is shared by so many men and women that a national body was organized in 1905 to promote the teaching of sex hygiene,—the Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. This society has its headquarters ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... fatherhood and motherhood God has given the special distinction above all estates that are beneath it that He not simply commands us to love our parents, but to honor them. For with respect to brothers, sisters, and our neighbors in general He commands nothing higher than that we ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... so much, then?" And she laughed disdainfully. Then with a sudden sternness, a sudden nobility almost in the motherhood which she put forward—"Rotherby is my son," she said, "and I'll not have my son the victim of your follies as well as of your injustice. We may curb the one and the ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty,—a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood. ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... chorus of love and benediction of the choirs within, as, with new hints of devotion in their patient faces, they folded their own little ones closer with some vague, struggling, incomprehensible sense of aspiration—they were one with their Royal Lady and the Blessed Madonna, in the sacred mystery of Motherhood. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... man, as a sex, for protection and support. This is true quite apart from economic considerations or from those arising from the relative physical strength of the sexes. The prime function of woman, biologically, is that of motherhood. She is, so to speak, mother in a much more important and more pervasive sense than man is father. In the case of woman, her functions are of necessity subordinated to this one. With man this is not the case. It is with the woman ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... day or night convenient to herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... softening. His homing instinct, as blind as that of a domestic animal, his rejoicing in his return, his childish plan for taking his mother by surprise, even his loyalty to the tramcars and all the busy littleness of Clapham Junction—these touched something in her akin to the goodness of motherhood. It occurred to her that perhaps he had been better off under the lights of the cafe than alone on his way to his bed; and at that moment the three men at the next table, their conference over, rose and went out. She sat still till they were clear; then, on an impulse of officiousness, got up ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... granite-faced quays, whose greatest afflictions are the occasional overflow of the Neva and the dynamite habit, was spoken into being by a monarch. Necessity stands sponsor for Venice, the beautiful, with her streets of water-ways and airs of heavenly harmony; while nature herself may claim motherhood of Swedish Stockholm, brilliant with intermingling lakes islands and canals, rocks hills and forests, rendering escape from ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... dry land illustrates the absolute formations instituted by Mind, 507:3 while water symbolizes the elements of Mind. Spirit duly feeds and clothes every object, as it appears in the line of spiritual creation, thus tenderly expressing the father- 507:6 hood and motherhood of God. Spirit names and blesses all. Without natures particularly defined, objects and subjects would be obscure, and creation would be full of 507:9 nameless offspring, - wanderers from the parent Mind, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... marriage with Oscar's mother, and without in the least condemning her, he knew very well that Oscar was a posthumous child. His nephew, therefore, seemed to him to have no claims on the Cardot family. But Madame Clapart, like all women who concentrate their whole being into the sentiment of motherhood, did not put herself in Cardot's place and see the matter from his point of view; she thought he must certainly be interested in so sweet a child, who bore the maiden ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... no punishment. The tender little creature grew as a blossom grows from bud to fairest bloom. His mother flowered as he, and spent her days in noble cherishing of him and tender care. Such motherhood and wifehood as were hers were as fair statues ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... To permit each other freedom was blank dishonor. That I and Anna should love, and after our love-journey together, go about our separate lives and dine at the public tables, until the advent of her motherhood, would have seemed a terrible strain upon our unmitigable loyalty. And that I should have it in me to go on loving Nettie—who loved in different manner both Verrall and me—would have outraged the very quintessence ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... years. Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay. Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superstitious, but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I referred to the great responsibilities of motherhood, and doubtless your mental comment was, "Yes, that is woman's peculiar sphere; there she should be content to remain." It is our sphere—beautiful, glorious, almost infinite in its possibilities. We accept the work; we only ask for opportunity ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... them. It seems to me that every man who had a mother should have a proper regard for womanhood. My own mother was a combination of all the best elements of the high character that belong to true wife and motherhood. Her devotion and friendship were as eternal as the very stars of heaven, and no misfortune could dwarf her generous impulses or curdle the milk of human kindness in her good heart. Her memory has been ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... promise of ripeness which bid fair to be redeemed. A few omens, however, remained, disquieting when those who loved her thought of them. One was that she got no human speech, though she understood everything that was said to her; another that she showed no signs of motherhood; a third that Bessie Prawle could not abide her. She alone of all the little community avoided the King household, and scowled whensoever she happened to cross the path of this gentle outland girl. Jealousy ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... roused by some of the strange facts collected by the writer? So women everywhere—many women at any rate—were turning indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections, servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the individuality and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their own fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools; casting away the old props and veils; determined, apparently, to know everything, however ugly, and to say everything, however outrageous? ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as the sunshine. It is sunshine at second-hand. It illuminates, but indistinctly. It beautifies, but it does not vivify or fructify. It comes indeed from the sun, but in too roundabout a way to do the sun's work. So, if a woman is pretty nearly sanctified before she is married, wifehood and motherhood may finish the business; but there is not one man in ten thousand of the writers aforesaid who would marry a vixen, trusting to the sanctifying influences of marriage to tone her down to sweetness. A thoughtful, gentle, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... their school. To one of these followers of Praxiteles, some say as a copy of a work of the master himself, we must attribute the Demeter now in the British Museum. This is a pathetic illustration of suffering motherhood. There is no exaggeration in the grief, only the calm dignity of a sorrow which in spite of hope ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... excitable motherhood took alarm. "I never heard," she said quickly, "that breathing in coal-tar smells ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... ceased and her pulse grew faint and fainter. Outside, the rain and sleet beat on the cracked window-pane, but a peace had entered the dingy little room. Kate received the great summons with a smile, for in one fleeting moment she had felt for the first and last time the blessed sanctity of motherhood. ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth—that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... said she was deformed; another suggested some hidden fault; but the poor girl was really as pure as a saint, as healthy as an infant, and full of loving kindness; Nature had intended her for all the pleasures, all the joys, and all the fatigues of motherhood. ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... to do the "nursing." There is no genuine nurse but the mother; and although others may do well under her eye and directed by her, she can never shift the mother-responsibility to other shoulders; and if she be worthy of the dignity of motherhood, she will never ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... true and healthy egoism towards altruism. But she travelled on another road and made jackets for the babies of strangers. Was that a better, a nobler thing to do? It stood for so much, and yet was nothing but fear of the burden of motherhood, and it was cheaper and less fatiguing to sit in the corner of a comfortable sofa and make little jackets than to bear the toil and broil of a nursery. It was looked upon as a disgrace to be a woman, to have a sex, to become ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... sun with its brothers, or run at the gentle call of its mother when she brings home game for it to feed on, the baby Coyote becomes one of the cutest, dearest little rascals on earth. And when the nine that made up Coyotito's brood had reached this stage, it did not require the glamour of motherhood to make them objects of ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... of kindred nature, how many of the stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from the tree of life which is ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... baby didn't cry very long. Seemed like it knowed there wuz a mother holdin' it,—not its own mother, but a woman whose life hed been hallowed by God's blessin' with the love 'nd the purity 'nd the sanctity uv motherhood. ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... is intended as a companion volume to "Child-Life in Art," and is a study of Madonna art as a revelation of motherhood. With the historical and legendary incidents in the life of the Virgin it has nothing to do. These subjects have been discussed comprehensively and finally in Mrs. Jameson's splendid work on the "Legends of the Madonna." Out of the great mass ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... makes its essay at the destiny of mankind. So imagination fashions its pictures. And back of philosophy and imagination we trace the elemental and highest forces of the soul. It is martyrdom and motherhood that inspire the immortal hope. Man faces the worst that can befall him—drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture—rather than be false to duty. The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... lips of Frederick; another followed from those of Tess. The minister's daughter was throwing the motherhood of the babe upon her. Teola had branded her squatter savior with a nameless child—a horror from which the student shrank! She saw unbelief rise quickly in his eyes, and saw him draw aside his long rain-coat as it almost touched the box upon ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... them both, Lancelot, and found them wanting; and now but one road remains. . . . Home, to the fountain-head; to the mother of all the churches whose fancied cruelty to her children can no more destroy her motherhood, than their confest rebellion can. . . . Shall I not hear her voice, when she, and she alone cries to me, "I have authority and commission from the King of kings to regenerate the world. History is a chaos, only because mankind ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Motherhood is a career for which especial talents are required. Very few women know how to bring up children properly. If you don't believe it, look at the difference between our angelic offspring, and the little imps next door! It is as unreasonable to suppose ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... of spinach and a profane starling or woodpecker bustles off her nest with shrewish outcry and lingers nearby to rail at me. Abashed, I stealthily scuffle back to get a spade out of the tool bin and again that shrill scream of anger and outraged motherhood. A throstle or a whippoorwill is raising a family in the gutter spout over the back kitchen. I go into the bathroom to shave and Titania whispers sharply, "You mustn't shave in there. There's a tomtit nesting in the shutter hinge and the light ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... a woman whom no child called mother! But thank God the instinct is not one that can be dammed up or lost, and in these writings we get a glimpse of that motherhood which was hers, and which her life showed to be deep enough and wide enough to sweep under its wing the human souls, men, women, and children, who, passing near it, and being in need, cried out for help, and never cried in vain. To quote ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... been soaked out of her long ago by those hot, steaming suds that enveloped her the greater part of her waking hours, and left her physically, mentally, and morally limp. Her one strong instinct was motherhood; but five little Flathers, opening feeble eyes on their future environment, had become so discouraged that they promptly closed them again. It was as if they really could not stand the prospect of life in that home with Mr. and Mrs. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... fellowmen, and, as a certain consequence, more unable to bear the little crosses and contradictions of daily life; and as Lucia, having brought one and another child safely into the world, settled down into motherhood, he became less and less attentive to her, and more and more attentive to that self which was fast becoming ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... swallowed by the chimney. Some of them sit on the doorsteps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all womanhood, because the fairest spectacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all known it to be in the happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember, smote me with more grief and pity (all the more poignant because perplexingly entangled with an inclination ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... opportunity my scorned profession gives me for knowing the human heart. This woman who comes to me cries: 'If I had only married I should have known the joy of companionship, of motherhood, and children growing up around me,' And this one wails: 'I have made a mistake. If I had not married and been condemned to a humdrum life what a noise I might have made in the world with my gifts and my beauty,' There is only one good, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... her efforts to do her duty to her sister's child, and it seemed to me that her face grew softer and her voice gentler as she went over the years they had grown older together, while the beauty of this woman's life was glorified by the willing sacrifices of imposed motherhood. I could not see Phyllis, for she was spending the night with friends in another part of the village. Next time, she hoped, I might be ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... be safety for the home and the family so long as babies are robbed of their mothers' care; so long as little children are made to do the work of men; so long as the girls who are to be the wives and mothers are sent into wifehood and motherhood unprepared, simply because the years of maidenhood are spent in factories that ought to be spent in preparation for wifehood and motherhood. Here is capitalism cutting at the very heart of the home, with Socialism ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing against this that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, to the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years of starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned to Marlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any knowledge of his deadly purpose ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... seed should be abundantly scattered over the earth. Parenthood, therefore, was the great career. But while men, in addition to begetting, might busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood. To be left an old maid became, accordingly, the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl; and to ward off that calamity the girl and her family, to the most distant relatives, would strain every nerve, whether by contributing to her dowry, or hiding her ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... maidenhood, blushing and sweet, When Douglass first poured out his love at her feet; And not when a shrinking and beautiful bride, With worshipping fondness she clung to his side; And not in those holiest moments of life, When first she was held to his heart, as his wife; And never in motherhood's earliest bliss, Had she tasted a ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... boat, though the waves dash high, and the skies are dark—we will man and woman the life-boat—side by side will the two great forces stand, the Motherhood and the Fatherhood, Love and Justice, the hope and strength of Humanity shall stand at the hellum. The wind is a-comin' up; it is only a light breeze now, but it shall rise to a strong power that shall waft us on to the New Land of ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... mother of God and man, the instrument of reproduction, of tender care, of motherhood, the disputatious, groping mind of man agreed to bow, silenced and awed by ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... body of her child in the divinest love ever manifested on earth. Its birth and manifestation are of the immortal spirit, and create in her offspring some consciousness of, some desire for immortality. Of all earthly phenomena this of motherhood is the most marvelous, and naturally the least understood, and the most slightingly regarded. Its universality reduces it ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... she the mother of his foe, He will not speak to her in hate; My boy will never stoop so low As motherhood to desecrate. But she shall know what once I knew— Eyes that are glorious to see, The light of manhood shining through— Because ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked and libelling all the sacredness of motherhood. In the black and narrow hall behind her we waded through a mess of young life, and essayed an even narrower and fouler stairway. Up we went, three flights, each landing two feet by three in area, and heaped with filth ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... was at a crisis of motherhood that is common to high and low. Since Mary of Galilee found her son in the Temple questioning Wisdom, and with awe beheld that he was no longer her little child, the paralyzing question, "What have ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... not taught to them, nor teachable to any others; but, in them, innate; and the seal and reward of persistence in great national life;—the obedience and the peace of ages having extended gradually the glory of the revered ancestors also to the ancestral land; until the Motherhood of the dust, the mystery of the Demeter from whose bosom we came, and to whose bosom we return, surrounds and inspires, everywhere, the local awe of field and fountain; the sacredness of landmark that none may remove, and of wave that none may pollute; while records of proud days, and ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... of fatherhood and motherhood God has given the special distinction above all estates that are beneath it that He not simply commands us to love our parents, but to honor them. For with respect to brothers, sisters, and our neighbors ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... dear," remembering that he had a daughter of his own, nearly the builder's age, "we men have come to think of women primarily as potential mothers, and secondarily as people of affairs. And considering that motherhood is something that is denied to us lords of ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... some few coyotes had paired, yet Breed could not induce Shady to follow him. The preceding winter her desire for motherhood had been thwarted. Collins had chained her to the cabin for a month. Coyotes are without the wolf suspicion which fills their larger cousins with fear of human habitations, and they are prone to investigate them at night while a wolf will not approach. Several dog coyotes had braved the dangers ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... my scorned profession gives me for knowing the human heart. This woman who comes to me cries: 'If I had only married I should have known the joy of companionship, of motherhood, and children growing up around me,' And this one wails: 'I have made a mistake. If I had not married and been condemned to a humdrum life what a noise I might have made in the world with my gifts and my beauty,' There is only ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... suppose that of 2,000,000! Among the number how many are young widows, girls engaged to marry men now dead, and how many whose natural vocation was marriage, motherhood, home-making, and all that is meant by such things as these? If this be the normal vocation of the normal woman how many of these have been deprived of all that seemed to them to make life worth living? Is it astonishing ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... others of kindred nature, how many of the stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from the tree of life which is ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... time forth she never again spoke on this, or any other subject of an intimate or personal nature, with her Royal spouse. Cold as an iceberg, pure as a diamond, she accepted both wifehood and motherhood as martyrdom, with an evident contempt for its humiliation, and without one touch of love for either husband or children. She bore three sons, of whom the eldest, and heir to the throne was, at the time this history ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... moment I saw her again, with her resemblance to the princess, and could not doubt her the daughter of whom Adam had told me; but in Lona the dazzling beauty of Lilith was softened by childlikeness, and deepened by the sense of motherhood. "She is occupied probably," I said to myself, "with the child of the woman I met fleeing!" who, she had already told me, was not half ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... her, partly because of the pity I felt for her on account of his treatment, and partly because I sincerely admired the beauty of her character. In consequence of that friendship, I undertook to watch over her entry into motherhood." ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... Gerster. Both of the younger singers were fresh from their first great European successes. Three years later Mme. Gerster went back to Mme. Marchesi, her teacher, with her voice irreparably damaged. "The penalty of motherhood," said her friends; "the result of worry over the failure to hold her place in the face of opposition," said more impartial observers. Mme. Sembrich went back to Europe to continue her triumphs after disaster had overtaken her first American manager, and in a decade returned, to ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of these women was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can still find it in them to forgive her for all that she has done and all that she may ever do. That's motherhood, ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... the solemn shade. O mother frail, thou hast not known a tear! Thy spirit, clothed in simple innocence, Wears the true garb of bliss. Not yet thy hour Of sorrow and departure; nor the pangs And mystery of motherhood are thine! And yet, weak one! some day, because of thee, God's love shall give a Saviour to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... seemed to be yearning over him like a mother. Her compassion, her benignity, seemed so different from his little Helena. This woman, tall and pale, drooping with the strength of her compassion, seemed stable, immortal, not a fragile human being, but a personification of the great motherhood of women. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... all these subjects, it is little less than criminal to allow girls to reach the age of puberty without the slightest knowledge of the menstrual function; young women to be married in total ignorance of the ethics of married life; women to become mothers without any conception of the duties of motherhood; other women, as the time approaches, to live in dread apprehension of "the change of life;" and many women unnecessarily to succumb to ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... tribute of honor, respect, devotion, and gratitude that love and a sense of duty can suggest. Let us acknowledge to the world the great debt we owe them by wearing, every one of us, boy and girl, man and woman, on Mothers' Day, a white carnation—the flower chosen as the symbol and emblem of motherhood. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... worldly motive. Here, too, are primitive man and woman, bearing their burdens, symbolized by their progeny, into the unknown future, ready to meet whatever be the call of earth. The woman suggests the overwhelming instincts of motherhood. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Levering answered. 'No woman begins that way. Every woman is in a state of natural subjection'—she looked up, and seeing Jean's face, smiled—'no, I'd rather say "allegiance" to her idea of romance and her hope of motherhood; they're embodied for her in man. They're the strongest things in life till man kills them. Let's be fair. If that allegiance dies, ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... self- preservation. It seems at first glance that the buck is more keen- witted than the doe; but this is a debatable question. Throughout the year the buck thinks only of himself. During fully one-half the year the doe is burdened by the cares of motherhood, and the paramount duty of saving her fawns from their numerous enemies. This, I am quite sure, is the handicap which makes it so much easier to kill a doe in the autumn hunting season than to bag a fully antlered and sophisticated buck who has only ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... Divergent Social Position. Shall We Return to Polygamy? All Children Entitled to Best Development Possible. The Work of the Children's Bureau. The Suggested Uniform Laws. Have Unmarried Women a Social Right to Motherhood? Ellen Key's Estimate of Motherhood. Monogamic Marriage Does Not Work Inerrantly. New Demand that Motherhood Have Social Support. The Increasing Tendency of Women Toward Celibate Life. Women Cannot be Forced ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... dream to her, this holy mystery of motherhood. She had not looked forward to the child's coming with any supreme pleasure, or supposed that her life would be altered by his advent. But from the moment she held him in her arms, a helpless morsel of humanity, hardly visible to the uninitiated amidst his voluminous draperies, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... coin, was all serene and grave wisdom; or, in the glowing and chastened colours of the later artistic time, the Virgin mother shines out, in Fra Angelico all adoration, in Bellini all beatitude, in Raphael all motherhood. The sculptor and the painter are restricted to the bodily signs of the soul's presence; but the poet passes into another and wider range of interpretation. He finds the soul stamped in its characteristic moods, words, actions. He then creates for the mind's eye Achilles, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... of the race, and every normal woman desires children. Children are not a handicap in the race of life either, they are an inspiration. We hear too much about the burden of motherhood and too little of its benefits. The average child does well for his parents, and teaches them many things. Bless his little soft hands—he broadens our outlook, quickens our sympathies, and leads us, if we will but ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... church, the school; and the press joined in the conspiracy. Supposedly, they were keeping the young in a blessed state of innocence. As a matter of fact, other agencies were busy disseminating falsehoods. Most of our boys and girls, having no opportunity to hear sex and marriage and motherhood discussed with reverence, heard these matters discussed with vulgarity. While those interested in the welfare of the young withheld the truth, those who could profit by their downfall poisoned their minds with error and half-truths. An abundance ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... your little pal into motherhood twenty times over, ready-made," said Leighton. "And you fought them, told 'em what you thought of it. You were right, boy; you were right. The wilderness must have turned their heads. But you ought to have stayed with it. Why didn't you stay with ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... they had left the creche he began to speak of the horror the babies in their incubating cases had caused him. "Is motherhood gone?" he said. "Was it a cant? Surely it was an instinct. This seems so ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... I call this happy news, or dreadful but profitable? Hapless am I, if I save my life at the cost of my own miseries. Strong is the tie of motherhood; no parent hates a child even if outraged by him. Yet, now that he is gone, I shall have rest ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... purer home life among our people in many parts of the South. I scarcely need tell you that our most embarrassing heritage from slavery was a homelessness and a lack of home ties. All the sanctities of marriage, the precious instincts of motherhood, the spirit of family alliance, and the upbuilding of home as an institution of the human heart were all ruthlessly ignored and fiercely prohibited by the requirements of slavery. Colored people in bondage were only as men, women, ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various
... belief that a time would come when a complete revelation would be possible. Her mind stipulated for a wider experience for Sally before then. It would be so infinitely easier to tell her tale to one who had herself arrived at the goal of motherhood, utterly unlike as (so she took for granted) was to be the way of her arrival, sunlit and soft to tread, from the black precipice and thorny wastes that had brought her to ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... interesting to read the recorded words of some of the world's greatest minds in tribute to motherhood. The following talk, quoting some of these, should be an impressive lesson to the young and to the ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... of their darling, and regarding the woe as retribution for her original lie about the birth, resolved to confess; but since absolution was granted only if atonement preceded it, she must be ready to restore to the rightful heir that which her pretended motherhood had taken from him. She therefore confessed to Pietro first, and he instantly seized the occasion for revenge on Guido, though that was not (or at any rate, according to the Other Half-Rome, may not ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... cold wind blows, Wet-haired, with eyes that sting one like a knife. Homeless forever, at her bosom close She holds the purchase of her love and life, Of motherhood, unglorified as wife; And bitterer than the world's relentless scorn The knowing her child were happier ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... one of those American matrons who do not allow marriage and motherhood to make vulgar physical impressions upon them. Her pale blue gown might have been worn by her daughter; her cool grey eyes looked out through a face without a wrinkle from a soul without a care. She was a patroness of ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... there are three things sacred above all others: the first is motherhood; the second marriage; the third ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... crime of infanticide, she may not plead for the most miserable of her sex; when colleges she is taxed to build and endow, deny her the right to share in their advantages; when she finds that which should be her glory—her possible motherhood—treated everywhere by man as a disability and a crime! A woman insensible to such indignities needs some transformation into nobler thought, some purer atmosphere to breathe, some higher stand-point from which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... among other deficiencies, the wide-spread unpreparedness of the average American girl for motherhood, and her desperate ignorance when a new life was given her. On the theory that with the realization of a vital need there is always the person to meet it, Bok consulted the authorities of the Babies' Hospital of New York, and found Doctor Emmet ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... operation was undertaken, which was long and severe, and from which she failed to react. So Ethel was an orphan at eleven, though not alone, for the good uncle, her mother's brother, took her to his home and never failed to respond to any impulse through which he felt he could fulfil the fatherhood and motherhood which he had assumed. Absolutely devoted, affectionate, emotional, he planned impulsively, he gave freely, but he knew not law nor order in his own high-keyed life; so neither law nor order entered into the ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... and the similarity of their civilizations, was our rival by necessity, our ill-wisher because of the past. The idea that we were bound to the mother country by ties of gratitude or affection he always combated. He denied her motherhood as a historical proposition, and demanded to know of Senator Butler, of South Carolina, who was moved to eloquence over America's debt to England for a language and a literature, whether he was duly grateful also ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... a positively formidable reality. All these Brodricks had firm, thick-skinned faces in which lines came slowly, and were few but strong. Faces, they were, of men who have lived in absolute sobriety and sanity, untorn by any temptation to live otherwise; faces of women to whom motherhood has ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... sweetest, most triumphant mother I have ever known. I am restrained by feelings of deepest reverence for her from speaking, as I might speak, of the rare and tender methods by which her motherhood has worked, patiently and alone, for nearly twenty years, and made of her two sons "lovers and friends." I have always felt that she owed it to the world to impart to other mothers all that she could of her divine secret; to write ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... said, "Ever since Carthoris disappeared, Dejah Thoris has grieved and mourned for her lost boy. The blow of years ago, when you did not return from the atmosphere plant, was lessened to some extent by the duties of motherhood, for your son broke his white ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... him that he was—was——" She pressed her hands over her mouth as she backed to the wall, then flung her arms out wide; her face was dead-white, her eyes blazing; she reminded the old woman of a tigress fighting for her cubs; she was beautiful beyond words in the tragedy of her motherhood. "I don't believe you—I ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... for the first time the quickening to life of her child. And during all that day, until then, she had forgotten that she was to know motherhood. ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... "if he was only old enough to go to school!" The wish was not entirely unmotherly, as motherhood goes in these days, for it is not an unusual thing for mothers to send their babes off to kindergarten as soon as they begin to babble, in order to be relieved of the responsibility of their care. But neither wishes nor hopes ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... see her as I saw her then. She sat On a low chair, the child upon her knees, Not six months old. Radiant with motherhood, Her full face beamed upon the face below, Bent over it, as with love to ripen love; Till its intensity, like summer heat, Gathered a mist across her heaven of eyes, Which grew until it dropt in large slow tears, The earthly outcome of the heavenly thing! [He walks toward ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... belief that, even at this early period, the religious impulse was more developed among women than men, he bases on this unproved hypothesis his theory of women's supremacy. "Wherever gynaecocracy meets us," he says, "the mystery of religion is bound up with it, and lends to motherhood an ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Fly's part does not at all surprise me: motherhood everywhere has great gleams of perspicacity. What does astonish me is the following result. The parcels containing the Linnets are left for a whole year uncovered on the table; they remain there for a second year and a third. I inspect the contents from time to time. The ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... curse me and go away; Making a bawd of my bounty, fouling the hand that gave— Till I rise in my wrath and I sweep on their path and I stamp them into a grave. Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood; Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... thought me criminal, And bold in wickedness, O brother mine! And now by servile hands, for all to see, He hastens me away, unhusbanded, Before my nuptial, having never known Or married joy or tender motherhood. But desolate and friendless I go down Alive, O horror! to the vaults of the dead. For what transgression of Heaven's ordinance? Alas! how can I look to Heaven? on whom Call to befriend me? seeing ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... specially distinguished Juno from all the other cats that I ever knew, was her big-hearted motherhood. If Juno had been a woman, how many desolate orphans she would have cared for! She would have given them summer outings, no doubt, and would have filled their stockings brimful at ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... grow tired of him. He hoped for this, but the hope was so faint, so secret, so hidden, that he hardly dared confess it to himself, knowing well that it was a deadly and altogether undeserved insult to her love. And even this faint hope vanished when she whispered the news of her prospective motherhood in his ear; now there was no possibility of a dissolution of their connection. If a human creature was indebted to him for its life, he must give himself up to it, and to this sacred duty he must sacrifice freedom, happiness, even self-respect. But ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... present, too, but she took it far more calmly,' he said, in a rallying tone. But as he spoke he wondered at his cousin's beauty. Her complexion had always been very transparent, but now excitement had added a soft bloom. Was it motherhood, he asked himself, that deepened the expression of her eyes and lent her that new gentleness? 'I never saw you look better, Gage,' he said, in quite an admiring voice; but Geraldine was ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... satisfactory variety entirely given to sleep. Zaidee and even Redge, adoring little sister and brother, had been allowed to hold him in their arms, so securely unstirring was their little burden. Lois, who had passionately rebelled against the prospect of additional motherhood, exhibited a not unusual phase of it now in as passionately adoring this second boy. He seemed peculiarly, intensely her own, not only a baby, but a spiritual possession that communicated a new strength ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... scarcely move, how could they hurt themselves! If you lay them on their backs, they will lie there till they die, like the turtle, unable to turn itself over. Not content with having ceased to suckle their children, women no longer wish to do it; with the natural result motherhood becomes a burden; means are found to avoid it. They will destroy their work to begin it over again, and they thus turn to the injury of the race the charm which was given them for its increase. This practice, with other causes of depopulation, forbodes the coming fate of Europe. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... directed the work of the New York State Charities Aid Association which made over into humane and intelligent social care-taking the inherited institutions of a more ignorant and indifferent time. The first woman to serve on the State Board of Charities in New York, Josephine Shaw Lowell, whose motherhood in the family and the state knew no bounds and whose statesmanship comprehended every social relation, is not the last to so serve. "The lady with the lamp," Florence Nightingale, who pioneered in trained nursing has had many a follower in this as in other countries. The annals of ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... "Elsie's Motherhood"[20] is a story in which piety of the Sunday-school kind is curiously contrasted with villany in the shape of Ku Klux outrages. Elsie's children are all sweetness, obedience, and kisses, and live in an atmosphere of goodness that is revolting ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... and now the head-nurse and the grand-equerry wheeled her couch of state into the Hall of Amethyst, that she might receive the tender wishes of the good fairies, while yet the sweet languor of her motherhood kept her from the fresh wind and bright dew ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... women who can do without it, who can take a life alone and make it sweet and satisfying? Not I, oh God, not I! I'm no exceptional creature. I'm just a plain woman. And if life doesn't give me wifehood and motherhood, it gives me nothing. I wonder if all women feel this way. This pretty little Lena,—is she bursting with primal need of giving and taking? At any rate she has put something in Dick's face that was never there ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... how it killed, but who it killed. No children played in the parks and playgrounds. The schools were empty. No babies were pushed in carriages or taken on tours through the supermarkets in shopping carts. No advertisements of motherhood, or children, or children's things were in the newspapers or magazines. They were forbidden subjects—too dangerously emotional to touch. Laughter and shrill young voices had vanished from the earth to ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... novels Vanity Fair is the best known and most popular. It is a remarkable picture of a thoroughly hard, selfish woman whom even motherhood did not soften; but it is something more than the chronicle of Becky Sharp's fortunes. It is a panoramic sketch of many phases of London life; it is the free giving out by a great master of fiction of his impressions of life. Hence Vanity Fair alone is worth ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Coventry Patmore The Toys Coventry Patmore A Song of Twilight Unknown Little Boy Blue Eugene Field The Discoverer Edmund Clarence Stedman A Chrysalis Mary Emily Bradley Mater Dolorosa William Barnes The Little Ghost Katherine Tynan Motherhood Josephine Daskam Bacon The Mother's Prayer Dora Sigerson Shorter Da Leetla Boy Thomas Augustin Daly On the Moor Gale Young Rice Epitaph of Dionysia Unknown For Charlie's Sake John Williamson Palmer "Are the Children at ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... been old Chief Flying Hawk himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her woman's penalty and come into her woman's kingdom; who had made a man of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly gone with him into the wilderness and become an ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Christ, who motherhood blessed, All life in thy Son is complete. The length of a day, the century's tale Of years do His purpose repeat. As wide as the world a sympathy comes To him who has kissed his own son, A tenderness deep as the depths of the sea, To motherhood mourning is won. No life is for naught. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway. Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, instead of dreaming, was driven to look ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... you'd call sick," Lily tried to reassure herself; "he's a reg'lar rascal!" she ended, tenderly; her eyes—those curious amber eyes, through which sometimes a tigress looks!—looked now at Maurice in passionate motherhood. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... renown of Madame de l'Estorade's virtue, her cold and rather calculating good sense, which often served to balance the ardent and passionate impetuosity of one you knew well,—what of that? And will you not grant that motherhood as it appears in that lady—pushed to a degree of fervor which I might almost call fanaticism—would be to her an ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... two great traditions of womanhood. One presents the Madonna brooding over the mystery of motherhood; the other, more confusedly, tells of the acolyte, the priestess, the clairvoyante of the unknown gods. This latter exists complete in herself, a personality as definite and as significant as a symbol. She is behind all the processes of art, though she rarely becomes a conscious ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... standard of perfection. The standard's strong point is contempt of the Chinese, who are hosts in Pell Street. Maggie Lynch came to be known as homeless, without a man, though with the prospects of motherhood approaching, yet she "had never lived with a Chink." To Pell Street that was heroic. It would have forgiven all the rest, had there been anything to forgive. But there was not. Whatever else may be, cant is not among ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... needs giants; it produces pigmies. It needs men to fight; it produces men to run. It needs women with minds broad enough to think and hearts large enough to love. It needs motherhood that, while it bends protectingly over the cradle of its own child, reaches out a mother-heart to all the suffering childhood of the race. It needs the capacity for heroism; it yields the tendency ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... makes itself felt. Elektra laments her father in a very pretty and undistinguished melody, and entreats her sister to slay Klytemnaestra to the accompaniment of a sort of valse perverse. It is also in tempo di valse that Chrysothemis declares her need of wifehood and motherhood. As an organism ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... audacious and impetuous than a man. She muttered threats and insults which the senor could not hear, furious that anyone would venture to oppose her nephew, the beloved whelp on whom, in her sterility, she had lavished all the ardor of frustrated motherhood. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... he spoke, and then he was worried. "Now I am unhappy!" he ejaculated. "What provokers to the wrong way are women! Her mother was like her—my beloved Adriana!" And his old eyes filled with sorrowful tears as he recalled the daughter he had lost in the first days of her motherhood. Very soon Sunna and Adriana became one and he was ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... was a woman whom no child called mother! But thank God the instinct is not one that can be dammed up or lost, and in these writings we get a glimpse of that motherhood which was hers, and which her life showed to be deep enough and wide enough to sweep under its wing the human souls, men, women, and children, who, passing near it, and being in need, cried out for help, and never cried in vain. To ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... the sign of the possibility of motherhood. Realizing this fact, one cannot fail to have a high idea of this function. Most girls, naturally, desire children. Little girls love their doll babies, and spend much time in caring for them, but as girls grow into womanhood they desire real babies. A woman who does ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... were already deposed from their former exalted position as heads of families and as leaders of consanguine communities. All their rightful prerogatives had been usurped. The highest development in Nature had become the slave of man's appetites, and motherhood, which had hitherto been accepted as the most exalted function either in heaven or on the earth, trailed ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... wasn't so big I would shake thee, Joseph! The idea of John Randolph being in this house and thee beating round the bush with thine angels!" and with all her motherhood shining in her eyes, Ruth Makepeace started ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... Woman's Hope of Triumph Man's Destiny and Mission Woman ignored in Eve Woman recognized in Mary Woman in Nestoria and the East Trials of Motherhood ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... the dead calf, licking the blood from its wounds and caressing and nosing it, trying in her dumb way to bring it back to life, she was a pathetic picture of wild motherhood, fighting and ready to fight to the end if need be ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... she's going to be able to educate him into real living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual is ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... moment, "I wonder if you even know what things are being said about what we've always believed in . . . motherhood for instance, and marriage?" ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... these children, but from the moment that the two cold, subdued little figures had looked in doubting amazement at the four kinds of preserves and three kinds of cake set out for their first collation in the new home, she had rejoiced unceasingly in a vicarious motherhood. ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... marriage relation almost inevitably produces humiliation and irritation. So serious has the strain become because of this false start that various devices have been suggested to repair it—Mr. Wells' "Paid Motherhood" is one; weekly wages as for a servant is another. Both notions encourage the primary mistake that the woman has not an equal economic place with ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... fourth Saturday in the month—was one of those slight changes that are profoundly significant. It stood for regeneration and a change of heart. It marked the close of an epoch. Frances's life of exclusive motherhood had ended; she had become, or was at any rate trying to become, a social creature. Her Day had bored her terribly at first, when it didn't frighten her; she was only just beginning to get used to it; and still, at times, she had the air of not taking it seriously. It had been ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... personal bearing, the children's faculties for that sort of thing soon cease to unfold, and with a gradual slackening of development the attractiveness disappears. The want is the more to be regretted in that, at a later time of life, when the women have been moulded by motherhood and the men by all the stress and responsibility of their position, such composure and strength often appear in them as to justify a suspicion that these uncared-for people are by nature amongst the very best ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... father was laid to rest in the shadow of a resplendent monument in an Eastern cemetery; and the rearing of the two boys was left wholly to their fashion-plate mother, whose only gods were dress and personal pleasure. Tabitha had heard many stories of the selfish, heartless woman, who found her motherhood a burden rather than a blessing, but she did not understand the difficulties one must contend with in attempting to reform such lawless youths, and being little more than a child herself, it was only natural that she should ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... received from him. Oh! you need not be astonished at so horrible a conspiracy; it frequently takes place. Many women are more lovers than mothers, though the majority are more mothers than wives. The two sentiments, love and motherhood, developed as they are by our manners and customs, often struggle together in the hearts of women; one or other must succumb when they are not of equal strength; when they are, they produce some exceptional women, the glory of our sex. A man of your genius must surely comprehend ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... amid their spare living, the child, as if looking up to the warm broad wing of her love above him, seemed replete with comfort. Yet in his moments of childish sickness, the first passing shadows upon the deep joy of her motherhood, she teaches him betimes to soothe [165] or cheat pain— little bodily pains only, hitherto. She ventures sadly to assure him of the harsh necessities of life: "Courage, child! Every one must take his share of suffering. Shift ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... inwardly at the picture of Victorian mourning and compared it to the mourning of to-day, as different indeed as was the conception of motherhood to-day. ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... born, for wherever there was water, in the pools and little streams and the hollows between the ridges, the voice of it in the morning was a babel of sound. Out of the sweet breast of the earth he could feel the irresistible pulse of motherhood filling him with its strength and its courage, and whispering to him its everlasting message that because of the glory and need and faith of life had God created this land of twenty-hour day and four-hour ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... Him; oh, how different, how far more endurable! I took myself in hand by-and-by when I grew older and had a better judgment of things. I knew mine was a life apart, a separated life; by that I mean that I should never know the joy of wifehood or motherhood, that I must create my own little world, ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of artists who worked in sufficient harmony with them to be properly called of their school. To one of these followers of Praxiteles, some say as a copy of a work of the master himself, we must attribute the Demeter now in the British Museum. This is a pathetic illustration of suffering motherhood. There is no exaggeration in the grief, only the calm dignity of a sorrow which in spite of hope refuses ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... was there that the young bride Mary visited her older cousin Elizabeth,—you remember the exquisite picture of the "Visitation" by Albertinelli in the Uffizi at Florence,—and the joy of coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and expectant soul of such a woman as Mary, ready to welcome His coming ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... What motherhood in its deep grief and joy, what sisterhood and wifehood may be, have never been sung with more penetration and exquisiteness than Wordsworth sang them. But of the immense range, beyond, of womanhood he could not sing. Byron's women are ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... sister land, patient and cheerily wise, With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes, Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood, Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... details," said the baroness. "Was not I the first to notice the change in my Calyste? A mother keenly feels the shock of finding herself second in the heart of her son. She cannot be deceived. This crisis in a man's life is one of the trials of motherhood. I have prepared myself for it, but I did not think it would come so soon. I hoped, at least, that Calyste would take into his heart some noble and beautiful being,—not a stage-player, a masquerader, a theatre woman, an author whose business it is ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... But a man, unless he is the weakest of all coxcombs, and unworthy to wear his beard, does not trouble himself because a woman admires another man's person more than his own. His feeling has its origin in the motherhood of woman, a recognition of which is latent in all social arrangements touching the sex, and in all man's feeling toward her. Man's jealousy is a mingled feeling of resentment of personal disloyalty, and of grief at unchastity ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... flung here and there. So in the 'Adoration of the Magi' the mother wonders with a peasant's wonder at the jewels and gold. Again, the 'Massacre of the Innocents' is one wild, horror-driven rush of pure motherhood, reckless of all in its clutch at its babe. So in the splendour of his 'Circumcision' it is from the naked child that the light streams on the High Priest's brow, on the mighty robe of purple and gold held up by stately forms like a vast banner ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... this time he had not wanted to think about, as he himself "lived in a happy erotic state, ennobled and beautified by the rejuvenating and expiatory arrival of children." But nevertheless he decided to write such a book, and so with sympathy and much old-fashioned veneration for motherhood the task ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... imitative processes, but with preliminary practice, subserving the purposes of self-development; and he considers that girls naturally turn to games adapted to train them for their subsequent profession of motherhood, whilst boys incline to games corresponding to their predestined activity as men. Even if we accept this theory of Groos, we are compelled to recognise a sexual element in the games of youthful animals. ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... love, sentiment, motherhood, and all the noble attributes that go to make the word, Mother, the most hallowed, most sacred, most beautiful word in ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... that new burden of motherhood, which you carried, might take some physical mark or blight from a presence like mine. But ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the fashion of the Archfield household, Anne had not seen the lady for several years, and was agreeably surprised by her appearance. Perhaps the marks of smallpox had faded, perhaps motherhood had given expression, and what had been gaunt ungainliness in the maiden had rounded into a certain importance in the matron, nor had her dress, though quiet, any of the Puritan rigid ugliness that had been complained of, and though certainly ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was thanking her for, but then she had never been able to fathom Nancy, much as she had always liked her in the old girlhood days that now seemed much further away to Louisa than they did to Nancy. Louisa was separated from them by the fulness of wifehood and motherhood, while Nancy looked back only over the narrow gap that ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Marriage—clothe the naked fact in what flowers of rhetoric we will- -has to do with the purely animal part of our being. The man is drawn towards it by his primeval desires; the woman by her inborn craving towards motherhood." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... nature, in addition to giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth—that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring down ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... quality of womanliness—that quality which men have ever praised and ever will praise. Those noble words of Judge Sewall at the open grave of his mother are an epitome of the patience, the love, the sacrifice, and the nobility of motherhood: "Jany. 4th, 1700-1.... Nathan Bricket taking in hand to fill the grave, I said, Forbear a little, and suffer me to say that amidst our bereaving sorrows we have the comfort of beholding this saint put into the rightful possession of that happiness of living desir'd and dying lamented. She liv'd ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... to her motherhood an unusual thoughtfulness and seriousness. How close to God she must have lived! How deep and tender her love must have been! How pure and clean her heart must have been kept! How sweet and patient she must have been as she moved about at her tasks, in order that no ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... her, counting me,' said Vedrine, with a wave of his hand towards his wife; and the look of Madame when her eye rests on her husband really does express the tender satisfaction of motherhood; she is like a Flemish Madonna contemplating her Divine Child. Talked a long time, leaning against the parapet of the quay; it did me good to be with these honest folk. That is a man, anyhow, who cares nothing whatever for success, and the public, and the ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... superstitions about morality and propriety and so forth. But I know, and the whole world really knows, though it dare not say so, that you were right to follow your instinct; that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman can have, and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood; and that the fact of your not being legally married matters not one scrap either to your own worth or to our ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... meantime? Let me tell the truth: motherhood became her so well that she was brazen from the very beginning. No delicacy, no pretty shame, no shrinking—she gloried in the growing fact. When she was brought to bed she made a quick recovery; she insisted upon a devout churching, an elaborate christening ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... would be the uprising of the women; the first upward step from sheer wage-slavery; the first advance toward the ideal of that coming woman, who should be a man in her freedom and her strength and her power, and yet woman of woman in her love and her motherhood and wife-hood. Industry, so Sally knew, was taking the young girls by the million, overworking them, sapping them of body and soul, and casting them out unfit to bear children, untrained to keep house, undisciplined to meet life ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... number; Dr. Dale's articles on Moral Prophylaxis, in the JOURNAL OF NURSING since the July number; Instructing Children in the Origin of Life, Elisabeth Robinson Scovil, in October JOURNAL OF NURSING; Leaflets and pamphlets published by American Motherhood, 188 Main Street, Cooperstown, New York; Publications of the American Association of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, New York City, ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... several things rather disturbing to the nerves of Mrs. Mumbray, and other ladies present.—Woman, it was true, lived an imperfect life if she did not become wife and mother; but this truism had been insisted on to the exclusion of another verity quite as important: that wifehood and motherhood, among civilized people, implied qualifications beyond the physical. The ordinary girl was sent forth into life with a mind scarcely more developed than that of a child. Hence those monstrous errors she constantly committed ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... Joseph's case nothing could be more revolutionary in appearance than the truth he was asked to accept. He was asked to believe in the virgin-motherhood of his bethrothed, and in the fact that the Child soon to be born was He Who was to save Israel from his sins. He was asked to accept these incredible statements and to act upon them by taking Mary to wife as he had proposed. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... has not menstruated, in which state of purity the Prophet's daughter is said to have lived and died. "Batl" has the sense of a "clean maid" and is the title given by Eastern Christians to the Virgin Mary. The perpetual virginity of Fatimah even after motherhood (Hasan and Husayn) is a point of orthodoxy in Al-Islam as Juno's with the Romans and Um's with the Hind worshippers of Shiva. During her life Mohammed would not allow Ali a second wife, and he held her one of the four perfects, the other three being Asia wife of "Pharaoh," the Virgin Mary and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... quality. Indeed, publications that consist of 12 pages and cover are always certain of a hearty welcome, while the present production of Mr. and Mrs. Cole has qualifications in addition to those just mentioned that recommend it warmly to all readers. The poem, "Motherhood," by Ethelwyn Dithridge is a truly noble and inspired effort. Amateur journalism is fortunate to number a poet of Miss Dithridge's attainments in its ranks. In "Retrospect and Prospect," Edward H. Cole sums up the three years of amateur ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the soft shadows of night, but always, always alight with love—of kisses, soft and warm, and yet often tearful—and of black, lustrous hair, over which there always seems to shine a halo—a very coronet of triumphant motherhood." ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... now that she was worn by time and sorrow she still looked like a goddess, exiled to earth, and altogether shabby—a deity in reduced circumstances—but none the less divinely fair and kind. Her great love for her child had so moulded her that she seemed the very incarnation of motherhood. So might Ceres have appeared as she wandered forlornly in search of her lost Persephone, gentle, weary, her fineness a little blunted ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... Anglo-American marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting the heart of American motherhood must have weakened the fibre of our future citizenship to the point of supinely accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and titles and the splendor ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... individual integrity, honesty, benevolence, and purity are the great requirements of humanity and of civilization. The infusion of the gentler, more persuasive influences and methods of feminine nature, and the higher quality and freedom of motherhood, are the only possible means of advancing the race to the altitude which the best specimens prefigure ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... her two small sons, and her theories on motherhood were so sweet and lofty that Bridgie, listening thereto, had been moved to tears. But in practice the theories were apt to go to the wall. To do Joan justice she would at any time have marched cheerfully to the stake if by so doing she could have saved her children from peril, but she was ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... their sorrow should be turned into joy; and this was based on His resurrection to which they should be witnesses. He compared their then present and prospective state to that of a woman in travail, who in the after joy of blessed motherhood forgets her anguish. The happiness that awaited them would be beyond the power of man to take away; and thenceforth they should ask not of Christ alone, but of the Father in Christ's name; "And," said the Lord, "in that day ye shall ask me nothing. Verily, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... are alive at all, that fatherhood and motherhood are allowed to be the right of drunkards and criminals of every grade, is a problem whose present solution passes any human power, but which all lovers of their kind must sooner or later face. In the mean time the children are with us, born to inheritances that tax every power good men and women ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... MOTHERHOOD Woman's Hope of Triumph Man's Destiny and Mission Woman ignored in Eve Woman recognized in Mary Woman in Nestoria and the East Trials of Motherhood The Glory ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... Syme! Destiny has use for you with your lively ways and portly form. You are to make history, help mold a political policy, fan the flames of war, and through motherhood make yourself immortal. Choose your casket wisely, O Widow Syme! It ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; and the time was to come when the she-wolf, for her grey cub's sake, would venture the left fork, and the lair in the rocks, ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... opening move in a well-thought-out campaign. Jemima had no idea of passing her entire life in the role of exiled princess; and since her mother evidently did not realize certain of the essential duties of motherhood, she intended to supply ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... referred to the poor spiritless lady, who, seeing that her son made no question of it, cast herself on his hands. Small loss to her was Diaper; but he was the loss of habit, and that is something to a woman who has lived. The blood of her son had been running so long alien from her that the sense of her motherhood smote he now with strangeness, and Richard's stern gentleness seemed like dreadful justice come upon her. Her heart had almost forgotten its maternal functions. She called him Sir, till he bade her remember he was her son. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the joy of married life, of fatherhood and motherhood; it destroys social life, club life, business life, and religious life. It robs a man of friendships and makes his days long, gloomy periods, instead of rapidly-passing epochs of joy and happiness. ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... turn of the head showed a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and Armenian, the smooth creamy mask of a Jewess, while here and there glimmered something more opulent and inviting still, which proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote motherhood of the zenana and the origin of the sun. An audience of fluttering fans and wrinkled shirt collars—the evening was warm under the gas-lights—sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself. Not an old woman in it ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Mantles the guilty globe, Since God has let dispense 40 Her prayers his providence: Nay, more than almoner, The sweet alms' self is her And men are meant to share Her life as life does air. If I have understood, She holds high motherhood Towards all our ghostly good And plays in grace her part About man's beating heart, 50 Laying, like air's fine flood, The deathdance in his blood; Yet no part but what will Be Christ our Saviour still. Of her flesh he took flesh: ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... him a minute, then turned and came slowly along the alley towards the bench where David sat, idly watching her. The heat was growing steadily, the child was heavy on her hand, and she was again clearly on the way to motherhood. The seat invited her, and she ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the mother's happiness with all her brood once more under her fond wings? It was wrote in her face, and acknowledged on her knees. Our house was large enough for all, but Aunt Hetty would not stay in it. She said, fairly, that to resign her motherhood over the elder children, who had been hers for nearly three years, cost her too great a pang; and she could not bear for yet a while to be with them, and to submit to take only the second place. So she and her father went away to a house ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... compunctiously, on a bench; her approximation, finally—for it was analogy, somehow, more than identity—to the transmitted images of rather neutral and negative propriety that made up, in his long line, the average of wifehood and motherhood. If the Roman matron had been, in sufficiency, first and last, the honour of that line, Maggie would no doubt, at fifty, have expanded, have solidified to some such dignity, even should she suggest a little but a Cornelia in miniature. A light, however, broke for him in ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... as strong as it was silent and undefined, that he should not have come to her in vain. Silent-footed as a beast of prey, silent-handed as a thief, lithe in her movements, her eye flashing with the new-kindled instinct of motherhood to the orphan of her father, it was as if her soul had been suddenly raised to a white heat, which rendered her body elastic ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... slim and tall from the dumpling baby that her aunt remembered, showing plainly the milky-fair, sunny-faced, wholesome woman that she was presently to become. Deb gazed at her with aches of regret—she had thought them for ever stifled in Claud's all-sufficing companionship—for her own lost motherhood, and of lesser but still poignant regret that she had not been allowed to adopt Nannie in Bob Goldsworthy's place. The joy of dressing and taking out a daughter of that stamp—of having her at home with one, to make the tea, and to chat with, and to lean ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... in the pride of young motherhood, replied consolingly: "Aunt, you should be proud of your children. Even Jack, the oldest of them all, is as good as he can be. Think of his long letters once in a while. He ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... hour of the day or night convenient to herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... golden moons and the blazing suns of those twenty years that were gone; it may be that the soft, sweet music of spring came to her again, filled with the old, old song of life, and that Something gracious and painless descended upon her as a final reward for a glorious motherhood on earth. ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... and mingled her tears with mine. Garry alone contrived to make some show of cheerfulness. Alas! all my elation had gone. In its place was a sense of guilt, of desertion, of unconquerable gloom. I had an inkling then of the tragedy of motherhood, the tender love that would hold yet cannot, the world-call and the ruthless, estranging years, all the memories of clinging love given only ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... wise enough and brave enough to dictate terms, as she did ages ago in old Aryavarta. When that day comes, and the really Divine Motherhood planted in every true woman's soul is recognized by man and woman alike, God grant that she may thenceforth hold the fort till the Kali-Yuga is at full tide, and the Spiritual Evolution of our present Humanity ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
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