"Wifehood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great change so soon to occur in her life, and Norvin began to suspect her of a tremendous depth of feeling. Unknown even to herself she was smouldering; unawakened fires were stirred by the consciousness of coming wifehood. Out here in the sun she was more tawny than ever, and, recalling the threat against her lover, the young man fell to wondering how she would take misfortune if it ever came. Feeling his eyes upon her, she met his gaze frankly with ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... 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 those of happy wifehood! ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... your case, my dear madam, for what? a youthful flow of spirits consequent upon a temporary release from the heavy responsibilities of wifehood and motherhood?" ...
— Christmas with Grandma Elsie • Martha Finley
... displeasure, and followed the strange man to a strange country. Sometimes the weakness of Japanese women is their greatest strength. This woman knew how to obey. In her way she had learned to love, but her limited capacity for affection was consumed by wifehood. Having married and borne a child to the man who required nothing of her, duty in life so far as she saw it was canceled. Further effort on her part was unnecessary until the time for her to ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... as that enjoyed by men, but they have a quickness of apprehension, which is usually called leaping at conclusions, that is astonishing. There, then, we have distinctive traits of a woman, namely, endurance, loving submission, and quickness of apprehension. Wifehood is the crowning glory of a woman. In it she is bound for all time. To her husband she owes the duty of unqualified obedience. There is no crime which a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving him or applying for that monstrous ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... lead a spaniel by a silken cord? Was she aware that, as she moved side by side with Mrs. Belcher, through the grand rooms, she was displaying herself to the best advantage to her admirer, and that, yoked with the wifehood and motherhood of the house, she was dragging, while he held, the plow that was tilling the deep carpets for tares that might be reaped in harvests of unhappiness? Would she have dropped the chain if she had? ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... night; and sometimes a yawn caught him in the middle of a word, and he talked while he yawned. She hated this. She was passing through that hard middle ground, that purgatory between maidenhood and wifehood in the course of which married folk find each other only human, after all. And she had not yet come to accept this condition, and to glory in it. She had always thought of Joel as a hero, a protector, a fine, stalwart, able, noble man. Now she forgot that he ...
— All the Brothers Were Valiant • Ben Ames Williams
... boy's handsome dark eyes, when the mother, young Mrs. Leigh, entered. What a beautiful and kind-looking woman was the good-natured and comely, but unintellectual, girl become! Wifehood and maternity had changed her thus, as I have since seen them change others even less promising than she. Me she had forgotten. I was changed too, though not, I fear, for the better. I made no attempt to recall myself to her memory; why should I? She came for her son to accompany her in a walk, ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... committee to put you and Miss Shaw anywhere on the program, that you could speak on one subject as well as another;" so they found themselves down for "Educational Influences of Home Life;" "Which Counts More, Father's or Mother's Influence?" "Does Wifehood Preclude Citizenship?" "The Evolution of the Home;" "The Family and the State;" "Shall We Co-operate?" "The Rights of Motherhood;" and numerous other topics. Both spoke every day during the Congress and the people seemed never to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... last, the supreme act of surrender—that, more than all else, renounces for ever and ever Philip, honour, wifehood, and lays ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... as the afternoon "trades" which blew him there. There was nothing to detain him in this weather and at this season. She began to be vaguely uneasy; then a little angry at this new development of his incompatibility. Then it occurred to her, for the first time in her wifehood, to think what she would do if he were lost. Yet, in spite of some pain, terror, and perplexity at the possibility, her dominant thought was that she would be a free woman to order her ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... often enough he had told her that he claimed no coercive right; that their union, if it were to endure, must admit a genuine independence on both sides. But herein, as on so many other points, she subdued her natural impulse, and conformed to her husband's idea of wifehood. It made her smile to think how little she preserved of that same 'genuine independence;' but the ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... means development—development of inborn talents. And education ought especially to develop the natural aptitude of most of our girls for efficiency in home-making and child-rearing. Most young women enter upon the vocation of wifehood and motherhood practically without ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... a fantasy. She was still in such a trance-like state that she had been an hour on the little packet-boat before she became aware of the agitating fact that Mr. Heddegan was on board with her. Involuntarily she slipped from her left hand the symbol of her wifehood. ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Graham's eyes dwelt longest. She sat with some sewing on the further side of the open fire, and her face was toward him. Had she changed? Yes; but for the better. The slight matronly air and fuller form that had come with wifehood became her better than even her girlish grace. As she glanced up to her husband from time to time, Graham saw serene loving ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... the bulwark of fallacy with which Conscience Tollman sought to safeguard her dwindling confidence in the ultimate success of her wifehood and she clung to ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Junius, and in three months she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to her employers. Modern women defend their office with all the fierceness of domesticity. They fight for desk and typewriter as for hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the firm. That is why they do office work so well; and that is why they ought ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... male), and the renunciation of motherhood, that crowning beatitude of the woman's existence, which, and which alone, fully compensates her for the organic sufferings of womanhood—in the conviction that, by so doing, she makes more possible a fuller and higher attainment of motherhood and wifehood to the women who will follow her. It is this consciousness which makes of solemn importance the knock of the humblest woman at the closed door which shuts off a new field of labour, physical or mental: is she convinced ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... any of these agencies had I possessed them! If my wifehood and motherhood, my affections and my helplessness were not advocates strong enough to win my cause, I could not ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... see, Ruth, that all this change must make you forget? And if you tried to put the past from you for no other reason than that your wifehood would be less untrue, you would be but following the instincts of a truly honorable woman. After that, all would be easy. In every instance you would be forced to look upon me as your husband, for you would belong to me. I should be the author of all your surroundings; and always ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... wifehood when she had read in his noble face something of that which he endeavoured to command and which to no other was apparent, the dignity of his self-restraint had but filled her with tenderness more ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... face, and no wife to worry him. He informed me once that all women are mistakes, especially that aggravated form called wives, and that he was thankful he had never married. I felt a certain delicacy after that about intruding on his solitude with the burden of my sex and wifehood heavy upon me, but he always seems very glad to see me, and runs at once to his fowlhouse to look for fresh eggs for my tea; so perhaps he regards me as a pleasing exception to the rule. On this last occasion he brought a table out to the ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... do what is right in the solemn warning business, so I will give notice to all simple young women who are now self-supporting and happy, that there is no statute requiring them to assume the burdens of wifehood and motherhood unless they prefer to do so. If they now have abundance of pin-money and new clothes, they may remain single if they wish without violating the laws of the land. This rule is also good when applied to young and self-supporting young men who wear good clothes and have funds in their ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... sound a ridiculous thing that a forlorn governess should be comforted for a lost love by the love of children; but it is true to nature. Women's lives have successive phases, each following the other in natural gradation—maidenhood, wifehood, motherhood: in not one of which, ordinarily, we regret the one before it, to which it is nevertheless impossible to go back. But Fortune's life had had none of these, excepting, perhaps, her one six months' dream of love and spring. That being over, she fell back upon autumn ...
— The Laurel Bush • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... not discovered my secret, but if she knew of it, she gave no sign of her knowledge. Often, as I looked at her, I wished she would. I can think of no more expressive sentence in regard to her than the trite one that she pursued the even tenor of her way; and I found the very perfection of her wifehood exasperating. Our relationship would, I thought, have been more endurable if we had quarrelled. And yet we had grown as far apart, in that big house, as though we had been separated by a continent; I lived in my apartments, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pierce her heart she would yield. The question was whether she had a heart, and she was not altogether sure of this herself. On one thing, however, she was resolved—she would not give up her liberty, ease and epicurean life for the duties, obligations and probable sorrows of wifehood, unless she met a man who had the power to make this ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... patient Griseldas and Enids and all the rest of it—but the self-sacrificing man, who is but poorly represented in our literature at all,—the man who loves the woman and gives himself for her, holding all the strongest forces and passions of his nature for her good, to crown her with perfect wifehood and perfect motherhood. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... golden moments when to the husband comes the sudden dazzling recognition of the mergence of that half-sweetheart, half-mistress, he has admired and a little tired of, into the reverential glory and loveliness of wifehood, motherhood, companionhood, through all life and on through the eternity of inheritance they shall leave to Jacks and Jills and their little sisters and brothers. In that lies the priceless secret of Christianity and its influence. The unspeakably immoral Greeks reared a temple ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... a man situated as he was, possessed of no private means and dependent entirely upon his earnings. In my mother, I believe he had married a lady of somewhat higher social standing than his own, who never was reconciled to the comparatively narrow and straitened circumstances of her brief wifehood. ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... into their whole strength, like their sisters, North and South: as women greedily do anything that promises to be an outlet for what power of brain, heart, or animal fervor they may have, over what is needed for wifehood or maternity. Theodora, he thought, angrily, looked at the war as these women did, had no poetic enthusiasm about it, did not grasp the grand abstract theory on either side. She would not accept it as a fiery, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... egoism made any attempt of conciliation on her part impossible. She had a temper too—she told herself, and her anger was righteous. And she also had an egoism that wouldn't allow itself to be trampled on. She had rights—of birth, of breeding, to say nothing of her rights of wifehood and womanhood for which she must insist upon respect. If he would not bend to her, even to show her ordinary consideration and courtesy, then she would not lower her pride one iota ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... be my music's theme; even if the symphony is unfinished. Are there 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 before—that I'd give my soul ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... the envy of a score of men That die for her as I do. Make her mine, And when the last "Amen!" declares complete The mystic tying of the holy knot, And 'fore the priest a blushing wife she stands, Be thine the right to claim the second kiss She pays for change from maidenhood to wifehood. ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... mother, was unable to perceive what was in the girl's heart. He considered it quite natural that she should be a trifle hysterical in anticipating her new life—that strange untraveled country! Ah, is there anything more pathetic, he thought, than a girl's anticipations of wifehood? But he would do his duty, and he fancied that he was doing his duty when he put aside her earnest, almost passionate protestations, and told her how happy she would be with the man who was lucky enough to have won the pure treasure ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... was chivalry itself in his forgiveness of and kindness to her, she realised that there was no hope of reunion with him. Days of weeping, nights of remorse, were her portion. But though she little dared to hope it, bright days were still in store for her—a happy and honourable wifehood, and the pride and blessing of children to rise up to do ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... about the house with delightful emotion. Everything seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she would like an alteration. All appeals to her taste she met gratefully, but saw nothing to alter. His efforts at exact courtesy and formal tenderness ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... had gone further. Daring to believe himself the earthly representative of Omnipotence, whose duty it was to see that all had the rights to which he thought them entitled, and assuming that a woman's chief right was that of wifehood and maternity, he had instituted the practice of plural marriage, as a "Prophet of God," on the authority of a direct revelation from the Almighty. It was upon this rock that the whole enterprise, the whole experiment in religious communism, now threatened to split. Not that polygamy ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do. And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... frightful was the collapse within her. Not only was her race ended, but her brother would never be pope, never secure the elevation which she had so long fancied she was winning for him by dint of devotion, dint of feminine renunciation, giving brain and heart, care and money, foregoing even wifehood and motherhood, spoiling her whole life, in order to realise that dream. And amidst all the ruin of hope, it was perhaps the nonfulfilment of that ambition which most made her heart bleed. She rose for the young priest, her guest, as she rose for ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... claimed!" she stormed. "I have claimed justice and the rights of wifehood, the protection of him whose wife I am; or, if he deny me, I claim that he must suffer with me—he who hath played the traitor's part to-night, betraying his Cause and his wife alike to their downfall!... I claim," she insisted, lifting, in ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... followed the hounds on fat ponies. She sat meditatively twisting a heavy signet ring up and down her little finger. The finger, the one which advises the world of the fact that some man in it has singled you out of the ruck as being fit for the honour of wifehood, was unadorned, showing neither the jewels which betoken the drawn-up contract, nor the pure gold which denotes the contract fulfilled. Those two had grown up in the knowledge that they would some time marry, though never a word had been ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... their morality in wifehood is all sufficient. A woman may boast of her "virtue" until doom's day, but "if her soul is small and her heart stingy" her example is not worthy of imitation—for she is only good to herself. She has no way of proving the ownership of the "virtue of virtues." It takes many virtues to make one ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... and in The Gates we hear the tap of the cripple's crutch upon the pavements of our enlightened cities. The world has advanced, Mr. Mario, and is filled with sad-eyed mothers and with widows who have scarcely known wifehood. Where is your evidence that this generation is ready for the 'blinding light of truth'? You believe that you have been given a mission. I do not question your good faith. You believe that throughout a series of earlier physical experiences you have been preparing for this mission. Granting ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... of married women-workers is different. Better education of women in domestic work and the requirements of wifehood and motherhood; the growth of a juster and more wholesome feeling in the man, that he may refuse to demand that his wife add wage-work to her domestic drudgery; and above all, a clearer and more generally diffused perception in society of the value ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... of a woman, as a representative of humanity, is the same as that of a man; namely, the perfect development of her being in the knowledge of truth, and in the practice of virtue and piety. Her peculiar destiny is wifehood and maternity. But if she declines this peculiar destiny of her sex, or it is denied her, still her common human destiny remains unforfeited; and she has as clear a right to the unrestricted use of every means of fulfilling ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... Take her back!" he exclaimed. "Give her further opportunity to exercise her brand of wifehood on me ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... politics, joining her forces to infidelity, and with the disbelievers of the Bible, to obtain for woman a place for which she is not fitted, and which will destroy her peace, injure and undermine her influence in the home, and cause her to neglect wifehood and motherhood, to turn from the interior world of a quiet home, to the outside world of conflict and strife. It is the boast of a writer in favor of "Woman's Rights," that "among the disbelievers of revealed religion, I have not found, during a life of half a century, a single opponent ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... life, the first twelve months of wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of rapid and changing experience. A few days out of their honeymoon had been spent at Oxford. It was a week before the opening of the October term, but many of the senior members of the University ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... up Emilius, not to be a merchant nor a physician nor a soldier nor to the practice of any other special calling, but to be first and above all a man, why should not Sophie too be brought up above all to be a human being, in whom the special qualifications of wifehood and motherhood may be developed in their due order? Emilius is a man first, a husband and a father afterwards and secondarily. How can Sophie be a companion for him, and an instructor for their children, unless she likewise has been left in the hands of nature, and had the same chances permitted ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... come back into quiet homes, and "What shall I do now?" is the question presented to their minds. Society soon fills in their time with imperious but frivolous demands, and while the mothers enter into this Christian work, young ladies soon come to think it is not for them. In time they drift into wifehood and into positions of responsibility of training bodies and souls, with no decided principles in relation to this question, and no intelligence as to the evil effects of this great scourge of intemperance. How sad it is to hear such an expression as this, "Oh, I rather like a man ...
— Why and how: a hand-book for the use of the W.C.T. unions in Canada • Addie Chisholm
... excellent comrades, and this is far more gratifying to me than to know that I had antagonized her into a formal acquaintance by my aggressive morality. I have an idea that, before my pretty guest reaches the time when she will consider wifehood and motherhood as life professions, I may convince her from a scientific standpoint that she better abandon her cigarettes. And to convince one's mind is far better than to ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the Teutonic beer-mug that 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
... virtue of chaste love And wifehood true to all that did it bear; But whosoever contrary doth prove Might not the same about her middle wear But it would loose, ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... and homage were always necessary to her, and in Fabre she found her ideal cavalier. Her salon now became more popular even than in the days of her young wifehood. It drew to it all the greatest men in Europe, men of world-wide fame in statesmanship, letters, and art, all anxious to do homage to a woman of such culture and with such rare gifts ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... study in emotion during the girl's recital. From terror it passed to indignation, from horror to the shrinking of outraged wifehood. Now she stammered her request ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... indebted to the wise counsel and guidance of the Prince Consort in the early decades of her reign. Not one act of folly has marred its even current. She has held up to the nation a high ideal of wifehood, motherhood, and of domestic virtue. None of her predecessors have bound their people to them with ties so human, her griefs and experiences moving them as their own. We think of her more as an exalted type ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... ringing tones. "Yes, it is rank rebellion, sedition and revolt against slavery, for life and love and freedom! You wonder where I have learned to turn and face this oppression of the world, instead of yielding to it, one more unhappy woman among the thousands that are bought and sold into wifehood every year! I have learned nothing, my heart needed no teaching for that! It is enough that I love an honest man truly—I know that it is wrong to promise my faith to another, and that it is a worse wrong in you ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... his pillow! Again, the entire tone of the Prologue to the "Legend of Good Women" is not that of a happy lover; although it would be pleasant enough, considering that the lady who imposes on the poet the penalty of celebrating GOOD women is Alcestis, the type of faithful wifehood, to interpret the poem as not only an amende honorable to the female sex in general, but a token of reconciliation to the poet's wife in particular. Even in the joyous "Assembly of Fowls," a marriage-poem, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... the manner of white women. She went further. With the assistance of the missionary and Rosebud she learned to read and sew, and to care for a house. And all this labor of a great love brought her the crowning glory of legitimate wifehood with a renegade white man, and the care of a dingy home that no white girl would have faced. But she was happy. Happy beyond all her wildest dreams in the smoke-begrimed tepee ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... aged in the seven months since her husband's death. She had aged considerably. Her spirit, her courage, were undiminished, but the years had at last levied the toll which a happy wifehood had denied them. Nor was Murray unobservant of these things. His partner in the fortunes of Fort Mowbray ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum |
