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More "Motherhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... 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 ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... 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 real regard ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... of everything, made the virgin for love; but with the first child her bosom loses form, her beauty its freshness. Woman is made for motherhood. Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the loss of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps. Behold the family, the human law; everything that departs from this ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... the Children's Hospital Alfred Tennyson "If I Were Dead" 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 Home?" Margaret Sangster The Morning-Glory ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... go back to the Manse, for she wanted to show Hugh their boy; and Hugh consented at once. And hand in hand they went through the tangled underwood and past the shimmering falls; and as Hugh looked down on his little wife and saw the new sweet womanliness that had grown on her with her motherhood, and the meek purity of her fair young face, he felt a proud happiness thrilling within him, and knew that it was God-given, and that its blessing would last him ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... frank now. George will act toward you only as your long worship of him, your sacrifices—all the unseen little ones every day since he was born—will make him act. Dear, it breaks my heart for you, but what you have to oppose now is the history of your own selfless and perfect motherhood. I remember saying once that what you worshipped in your son was the angel you saw in him—and I still believe that is true of every mother. But in a mother's worship she may not see that the Will in her son should not always be offered ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... shocked Mr. Thorndike. For the woman he felt a thrill of sympathy, but at once saw that it was superfluous. From the secure and lofty heights of motherhood, Mrs. Bernard smiled down upon the assistant district attorney as upon a naughty child. She did not even deign a protest. She continued merely to smile. The smile reminded Thorndike of the smile on the face of a mother in a painting by Murillo he had lately presented to the ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... 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 ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff with the crisp rime of winter's breath, lie beyond my horizon; the ewes in the folding, their mysterious eyes quick with the consciousness of coming motherhood, answer another's voice and hand; while I lie here, not in the lonely companionship of my expectations, but where the shadow is bright with kindly faces and gentle hands, until one kinder and gentler still carries me down the stairway into ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... while with one hand she rocked the wicker cradle beside her, where a boy of four years was tossing. Her hazel eyes were full of kindly light, the whole face eloquent with that patient, limitless tenderness, which is the magic chrism of maternity, wherewith Lucina and Cuba abundantly anoint Motherhood. The blessed and infallible nepenthe for all childhood's ills and aches, mother touch, mother songs, soon held soothing sway; and when the woman laid the sleeping babe on her own bed, and covered her with a shawl, she saw her husband leaning ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... 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 not desire children ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... women even when some of their men sold out the night before election to a notorious political rounder. They proved that they were trying to keep step with the march of progress and with a little patience, trust and vision the universal tie of motherhood and sisterhood can and will overcome the prejudice against ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... the shore remained; But, toiling upward through the night, A wistful mother had just gained The summit of the sacred height, Where Juno's far-famed statue stood,— Palladium of motherhood. ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... 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 have ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... reminded the Reverend Jeffrey Sale that the creed of his Church had not really been inspired by Christ, but dictated by Constantine and the Council of Nicea; who wanted to know why, in so great a religion, was there no true worship of woman—no recognising, in the creative principle, the Divine Motherhood of God? Finally, she had scandalised them both by quarrelling with their exclusive belief in one single instance, through endless ages, of the All-embracing, and All-creating revealed in terms of human life. Was not that same ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... 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 His coming with ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... torches seem,—by which the Month attires Barbaric beauty; like some Asian queen, Towering imperial in her two-fold crown Of harvest and of vintage; all her form Majestic gold and purple: in her mien The might of motherhood; her baby brown, Abundance, ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... Abercrombie, "a great many of us feel like that when we are young and hot-headed. I nearly said empty-headed. Then we read fat books about the divine right of Motherhood, Free Love and State Maternity. All very well in the abstract and fine theories to argue about, but they do not work in real life. Believe me, the older you get the more and more you realize how far ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... 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 ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... honest face half-apologetically, and shine full upon some one or other of the three, whom she honoured with her whole heart and soul, and who, she feared, might be offended at what she called her "hame-ower fashion of speaking." Indeed it was wonderful what a share the motherhood of this woman, incapable as she was of entering into the intellectual occupations of the others, had in producing that sense of home-blessedness, which inwrapt Hugh also in the folds of its hospitality, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... emotion, and, therefore, do not easily become material for art whose function it is to express and communicate emotion. Particular qualities, like love, honour, faith, may and do stir emotion; and certain bundles of qualities like, for example, motherhood tend towards personification; but the normal class label like horse, man, triangle does not easily become material for art; it remains a practical utility ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... 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. ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... our means—do give character to the average flat. It's made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it's made for social show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby in a flat! It's a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood. The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life. It's made to give artificial people a society basis on a little money—too much money, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... daughter, his father an Israelite, or both of his parents were Israelites, is problematic. Royal families are not apt to adopt an unknown waif into the royal household and bring him up as their royal own, especially if this waif belongs to what is regarded as an inferior race. The tie of motherhood is the only one that could over-rule caste and override prejudice. If the daughter of Pharaoh, or more properly "the Pharaoh," were the mother of Moses, she had a better reason for hiding him in the bulrushes than did the daughter of a Levite, for the ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... and what is the end of it? Behold me here a barren stock, while the women of my youth have a troop of children at their side, and grandchildren at their knee I gave up the sweet joys of wifehood and motherhood for what? For my dear brothers. They have gone and left me long ago. For my art. It has all but left me too. I have the knowledge still, but what avails that when the hand trembles. No, Gerard; I look on you as my son. You are good, you are handsome, you ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... portraits. Mrs. Palmer was a delightful patron, her own enjoyment of art, in any of its forms, amounted to enthusiasm, and her great physical beauty, to a beauty lover, made every visit from her an epoch. I have never seen the face of an adult woman who has had the experience of wifehood and motherhood which retained so perfectly the flawless beauty of childhood. I have often gazed at the angelic face of some child, and wondered why each year of life should wipe out some exquisite line of drawing, or absorb the entrancing shadows ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... inscrutable light upon the beautiful countenance, whose expression suggests that she is looking far into the future of the infant whom she holds in her arms, are a wonderful portrayal of the mystery and the sacredness of motherhood. The one statue degrades maternity; the other ennobles and exalts. The one embodies a pernicious and a false ideal; the other embodies the ideal that must appeal to all that is noble and divine in human life, and it thus ministers to moral progress ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... relaxation and I would not choose the foreign 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, but need ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... the girl, retiring in a great hurry in the utmost amazement; for over Irene's curious, expressive little face had come a new look—a look of protection, almost of motherhood. ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... She held the honour of both those conflicting interchangeable personalities in her hands; and, whether she were strong enough to adjust their differences or not, she must in no wise betray either of them. The latent motherhood in her cried out to protect and to shield them both, to spare them both. For in this stage of the affair, while the hallucinations of deadly fever—in a sense mercifully—confused her, its grosser aspects did not present themselves to her mind. She ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Rhodopis. "A woman's girlhood has its own peculiar charm, but her true dignity comes with motherhood. It is the feeling of having fulfilled her destiny, which raises her head and makes us ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... And noisy laughter, vowing she would learn Romance and sweet simplicity were well For harper minstrel, singing in the hall, But not for courtiers living in the world. Once, when she faced the thought of motherhood,— For some brief days of sweet expectancy Never fulfilled for her,—she was aware Of thirst for living water, and a dread Of the light, shallow life she led, fell on her; She went to Torm, and spoke, in broken words, The unformed longing of her dawning soul. ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... become Mme. Marie Gaston. Renee de Maucombe was married at the age of seventeen, upon leaving the convent. She gave her husband three children, though she never loved him, devoting herself to the duties of motherhood. [Letters of Two Brides.] In 1838-39 the serenity of this sage person was disturbed by meeting Dorlange-Sallenauve. She believed he sought her, and she must needs fight an insidious liking for him. Mme. de Camps counseled and enlightened Mme. de l'Estorade, with considerable ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... embryo of faculties other than those which had survived Mr. Frayling's rule; but her nature was plastic; one of those which requires the strong and delicate hand of a master to mould it into distinct and lovely form. Motherhood, as it had appeared to her in the delicate dreams of those young days, had promised to be a beautiful and blessed privilege, but then the children of her happy imaginings had been less her own than those of the shadowy perfection who was to have been ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... which up to 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 ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... elsewhere parsimonious, she seems frequently extravagant; yet that extravagance is the cheapest means of attaining the necessary end. Thus, when woman's passion is no longer required for the function of motherhood, its impulsion may yet be counted on for the psychological explanation of more than one ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... 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
... she was a nice woman. Later on he finds her 'looking the very incarnation of home, with her cheerful healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress.... She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood—of Charity with a babe at her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had so evidently intended her to ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... judgment and taste. Mrs. Motley was a woman who could not be looked upon without admiration. I remember well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her "regal beauty," as Mr. Phillips truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which made her the type of a perfect motherhood. Her character corresponded to the promise of her gracious aspect. She was one of the fondest of mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped and expected more than she thought it wise to let him know. The story used to be current that in their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... did not 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... she returned from a ride to find Evelyn again at the detested davenport, her head bowed upon her arms, like a flower broken with the wind, all the inherent motherhood in her rose up and overflowed. Hastily crossing the room she knelt down beside the small tragic figure and kissed a pearl-white fragment of forehead; the only spot available at the moment. "Poor darling!" she whispered. "Is it really as bad as ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... and of long growth. On the last day of his life he had become her betrothed husband, and for one hour all her future living, as woman, wife, and mother, had been bound up with his, to have being only with him—to disappear in black darkness with his tragic death, as though he had taken all motherhood and wifehood and womanhood of hers to the grave forever. As for what Don Teodoro had said of his having loved Matilde, she believed that less than all the rest, if possible; and the fact that the priest had said it proved beyond all doubt to her that he was out of his mind. ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... should they, good, fervent Jewish laymen?—the magic of the baby Christ as it was felt by those mediaeval ascetics, suddenly reawakened to human feeling. There is neither tenderness nor reverence in the Gospels for the mother of the Lord; some rather rough words on her motherhood; and that mention in St. John, intended so evidently to bring the Evangelist, or supposed Evangelist, into closer communion with Christ, not to draw attention to Christ's mother. Yet out of those slight, and perhaps almost contemptuous ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... thirty has not settled down resignedly into a lonely old age. Let a little child come tilting by, or a little child's foolish belongings intrude themselves upon her vision, and old, odd longings creep out of secret crannies and haunt her, willy-nilly. It is the latent motherhood within her that has been denied its own. It was the secret of the soft wistfulness in Cornelia's eyes. So she sat until the minister came home. It was the sound of his big step on the walk that roused her and sent the color into her face ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... Raphael's achievement in many directions, he is remembered above all else as a painter of Madonnas. Here was the subject best expressing the individuality of his genius. From the beginning to the end of his career the sweet mystery of motherhood never ceased to fascinate him. Again and again he sounded the depths of maternal experience, always making some ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... You remember, my dear aunt, the good Lady Culham, who was our Dorsetshire neighbour, and tried hard to mend my ways at Carteron? This poor Duchess—for so she called herself—was just such another. A woman made for comfort, housewifery, and motherhood, and by no means for racing about Europe in charge of a disreputable parent. I could picture her settled equably on a garden seat with a lapdog and needlework, blinking happily over green lawns and mildly rating an errant gardener. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... 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
... honoured thee, And therefore Creon 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 that I have earned, ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... over 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 for ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... functions. There is indeed only one of these female pagan divinities whose role she has not endeavoured to usurp—Athene. Herein she reflects the minds of her creators, the priests and common people, whose ideal woman contents herself with the duties of motherhood. I doubt whether an Athene-Madonna, an intellectual goddess, could ever have been evolved; their attitude towards gods in general is ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... sake of the lost, Kate Lee voluntarily laid aside her own hopes of marriage and motherhood. Detached and in a sense lofty in her walk amongst her comrades, still there were those who had coveted her as a continual comrade in the war, and had made their plea. Once she almost yielded, but pity for the unsaved prevailed ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... little idiot she'd been not to have seen the thing for herself! She'd been, all the while, beating her head against blind walls when there was a door there waiting to open of itself when the time came. Motherhood! There'd be a doctor and a nurse at first, of course, but presently they'd go away and she'd be left with a baby. Her own baby! She could care for him with her own hands, feed him—her joy reached an ecstasy at this—feed him from ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... on that point, she loved her daughter to kiss her and stroke her hands and her face, but she never liked her to play at being the mother, nor had she ever encouraged her daughter in the occupations of a doll. She was the mother and Mary was the baby, and she could not bear to have her motherhood hindered even in play. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... 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, and ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... "party" was the 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
... he exclaimed. "Give her further opportunity to exercise her brand of wifehood on me and motherhood on the boys!" ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... the conviction that if the right man talked to a roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of motherhood—and his words were wise and pure enough—that not one of the women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many young women of the arriving generation are tremendously ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... speech there were brief addresses by Dr. David Dearson on the disastrous results to motherhood should women participate in the active life of the nation; by the Reverend Jayson Yerkes on the Pauline doctrine of the subserviency of the truly feminine woman; by Mrs. Workman Werther on the decadence of feminine charm among women aping men's interests in life, and Crawford Dorer, a labor ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... strength. I confess I should like to live for a good many years yet. I suppose Helen will marry by and by. I should like to be a witness of her happiness, rounded, full, complete, sanctified by motherhood. Think, Mary, of my holding Helen's children on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... eyebrows rose to a point. "What," she asked, in the tones of delighted motherhood overlaid with a slight exasperation which she habitually used toward Burnaby, "has tea got to do with a man you met on the Upper Liara last summer and a man you ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... bygone winter," which called up "bright pictures of boys and girls with their rosy cheeks and flashing skates,—a breeze of old associations." At Benares, various root ideas of Hindoo holiness were illustrated, including the linga worship and the passion for motherhood in that strange phallic cult which, from India to Japan, has survived all later forms of religion. In Calcutta, Old India had already been forgotten in the newer and more Christian India. He visited especially the American Union Mission Home, where Miss Louise ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... out the sorrow, careful that he might taste only the joy. So far, 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 not thy body so vehemently. Pain, taken quietly, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... with heart consumed by eagerness. It was some slave girl busied among the vines of Abul Malek, he decided, for she translated all the fragmentary airs that float through summer evenings—the songs of sweethearts, the tender airs of motherhood, the croon of distant waterfalls, the voice of sleepy locusts—and yet she wove them into an air that carried words. It was ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... symbolical.' 'I am not so sure of that,' I replied, remembering a Norwegian cousin of my own who treasured a favourite doll until she was nearer thirty than twenty. 'They of course symbolise the unsatisfied passion of motherhood in Mrs. Solness's heart, but I have very little doubt that Ibsen makes use of this "symbol" because he has observed a similar case, or cases, in real life.' 'What!' cried the critic. 'He has seen a grown-up, a middle-aged woman continuing to "live with" her dolls!' I was about to say ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... different people; but that is only because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity. I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence; with silver-tongued rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called "The Gracious Ones." I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Potential motherhood can endure throes of travail other than physical; and for the next week Lynda passed through all the phases of spiritual readjustment that enabled her, with blessed certainty of success, to accept ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... 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
... of things totally different—of Hender, of the little girls, who would regret her absence from the workroom, and it was not without surprise that she caught herself wishing suddenly they were her own children. The wish was only momentary, but it was the first time a desire for motherhood had ever ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... 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 if they rebel? If they determine ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... royally maternal feeling of an Elizabeth towards her people in a wedded constitutional sovereign. The judgment was a mistake. The formal limitations of our Queen's prerogative, sedulously as she has respected them, have never destroyed her sense of responsibility; wifehood and motherhood have not contracted her sympathies, but have deepened and widened them. The very sorrows of her domestic life have knit her in fellowship with other mourners. No great calamity can befall her humblest subjects, and she hear of it, but there comes the answering ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... Margherita looked down upon the street which she had grown to love—the suggestion of darkness had softened it, mellowed it with a twilight beauty, like the face of an old friend seen in the glow of lamplight. The shouting of urchins at play floated upward, stirring the chords of motherhood in her breast and emphasizing her loneliness. With Oliveta gone what would be left? Nothing but an austere life compressed within drab walls; nothing but sickness and suffering on every side. She had begun to think a great deal about those walls of late ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... the fly's part does not at all surprise me: motherhood everywhere has gleams of great 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 ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... upon the subject of pets, learned that all this was quite common. Many women in Society artificially made themselves barren, because of the inconvenience incidental to pregnancy and motherhood; and instead they lavished their affections upon cats and dogs. Some of these animals had elaborate costumes, rivalling in expensiveness those of their step-mothers. They wore tiny boots, which cost eight dollars a pair—house boots, ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... 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
... maid; and she who missed A little mouth that used to catch, and cling— A small, sweet trouble—at her yearning breast;* Yea, she of Zarephath, who sat and mourned The silence of a birdlike voice that made Her flutter with the joy of motherhood In other days, she came to know the heart Of Pity that the rugged prophet had. And when he took the soft, still child away, And laid it on his bed; and in the dark Sent up a pleading voice to Heaven; and drew The little body to his breast; and held It there until the bright, young soul returned ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... been what 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
... natural to women, seeking apparently to discover in what interest he stepped forth to explain Mademoiselle de Verneuil's birth. Corentin, on the other hand, who was studying the lady cautiously, denied her in his own mind the joys of motherhood and gave her those of love; he refused the possession of a son of twenty to a woman whose dazzling skin, and arched eyebrows, and lashes still unblemished, were the objects of his admiration, and whose abundant ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... for a woman is that she should be a good wife and a good mother. It is not necessary to say this in direct words to every small girl, but she ought to be so educated, so guided, as to instinctively realise that wifehood and motherhood is the flower and perfection of her being. This is the hope and ideal that should sanctify her lessons and sweeten the right and proper discipline of life. All learning, all handicraft, and all artistic training should take their place ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... 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
... cowardice sprang out, became almost obscenely evident, then faded and vanished as though it had been only a creation of her own mind. Her reactions to it were not those attributed to her sex—it roused her neither to disgust nor to a premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost completely without physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of what she felt to be his fear's redeeming feature, which was that though he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain—when his imagination was given play—he had yet a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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
... is true, dreaded the coming of 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
... years—thirteen, to be exact—to start my story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children. Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All the responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended by walking along with the bull on his shoulders. However, I did the best I could. When Gertrude got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey asked ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... looked far beyond the time of motherhood were suckling infants, while all the young women seemed well provided with children. Girls of five or six were playing games with sleeping infants strapped to their backs, and even boys were impressed into this nursery work. The younger children are clothed only in kimonos, ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... wondering whether the "sheltered" girl's bringing-up might not unfit her for all subsequent contact with life. How much nearer to it had Mrs. Leath been brought by marriage and motherhood, and the passage of fourteen years? What were all her reticences and evasions but the result of the deadening process of forming a "lady"? The freshness he had marvelled at was like the unnatural whiteness of flowers forced in ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... carried on the foot of the bed and Vic discovered, to his great content, that it was not hard to meet her eyes. Usually girls embarrassed him, but he recognized so much of Joan in the features of the mother that he felt well acquainted at once. Motherhood, surely, sat as lightly on her shoulders as fatherhood did on Dan Barry, yet he felt a great pity as he looked at her, this flowerlike beauty lost in the rocks and snow with only one man near her. She was like music played without an ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... was, for the most part, only manifest as one of those little embodiments that are but given and grown out of such loyal and happy motherhood. She was a real baby,—not a little interloping animal. She was never nursed or tended in a hurry. Babies blossom, as plants do, ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... 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 lap of ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... position as either of these cases indicate, although here again personal testimony brings to light notable exceptions of the social behavior of individuals in certain localities, where this type, that is, the colored offspring of white motherhood, was regarded as a separate class, above the ordinary person ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... an 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, you know, the good we haven't ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... 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
... women but never was none so hard as was that woman's birth. Then she set it all forth to him for because she knew the man that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her words for he felt with wonder women's woe in the travail that they have of motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a fair face for any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine twelve bloodflows ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... woman, "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 ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... received for a while its due reward; but an event which usually crowns the happiness of a household to them proved fatal. Ginevra had a son, who was, to use the popular expression, "as beautiful as the day." The sense of motherhood doubled the strength of the young wife. Luigi borrowed money to meet the expenses of Ginevra's confinement. At first she did not feel the fresh burden of their situation; and the pair gave themselves wholly up to the joy of possessing a child. ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... was not large the young couple were brave enough to encounter the labors and toils of frontier life, and begin for themselves on virgin soil and amid new scenes. It required bravery on the part of the young bride. But there were noble maidens in those days. The cares and duties of motherhood soon followed, but the house-cares and the maternal obligations were performed to the admiration of later generations. The fathers and mothers of New England were strong and hardy. Their praises come ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... restored to strength, of course these cares ceased. But now the new instincts of motherhood absorbed her, and, brooding over the rosy child that was her own, caressing its waking, or hanging above its sleep, she scarce noted that her husband's absences from home grew more and more frequent, that strange visitors asked for him, that he came home ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... 'O dearer than the daylight to thy sister, wilt thou waste, sad and alone, all thy length of youth, and know not the sweetness of motherhood, nor love's bounty? Deemest thou the ashes care for that, or the ghost within the tomb? Be it so: in days gone by no wooers bent thy sorrow, not in Libya, not ere then in Tyre; Iarbas was slighted, and other princes nurtured by the triumphal land ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... may be, she saw once more the 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
... had said he could not understand. She had referred to her motherhood. But Scipio was a man who could understand just that. He could understand with his heart, where his head might have failed him. He read into the distracted woman's letter a meaning that perhaps no other man could have read into it. He read a human soul's agony at the severing of itself from ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... cold, and she drew her breath through her teeth to prevent the utterance of moans of pain. She was never free now from the feeling of guardianship which is the delight and the haunting uneasiness of motherhood. "I must be warm," she thought, "for ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... startled. Had his growing absorption in other things led him to neglect his child? Phil needed a mother. This dear, thoughtful woman, whom nature had made for motherhood, had seen things about his child, that he, the child's father, had not perceived. To a mind like Colonel French's, this juxtaposition of a motherly heart and a motherless ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... away hastily to seek comfort and counsel in some other direction. With the selfish absorption of young motherhood she entirely disregarded Clovis's obvious anxiety about the asparagus sauce. Before she had gone a yard, however, the click of the side gate caused her to pull up sharp. Miss Gilpet, from the Villa Peterhof, had come over to hear details of the ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... wife of the metal-smith, is not for one of your quality, though the wench is well enough now with her baby on her arm and the best of her seen by a poet and made enduring. He, like our Bernardo, had motherhood in such esteem that he held it would ransom a sin. A sin? I am no casuist to discuss rewards and punishments; but if Socrates were rightly informed and sin indeed ignorance, I have no whips for Mariota's square shoulders. Her baby, I warrant, plucked her from the burning. I am not so sure ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 brought ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... duties of maternity disqualify for the performance of the act of voting. It can not be, and I think is not claimed by any one, that the mother who otherwise would be fit to vote is rendered mentally or morally less fit to exercise this high function in the state because of motherhood. On the contrary, if any woman has a motive more than another person, man or woman, to secure the enactment and enforcement of good laws, it is the mother, who, beside her own life, person, and property, ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... 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 ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... in giving us a choice between love and motherhood. I have made mine. My children shall be my gods, and this spot of earth ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... 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 as the only defender of the home it is charged with attacking. ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... christened 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
... ages, and with every people, the arcana of life and death, the mysteries of birth, childhood, puberty, adolescence, maidenhood, womanhood, manhood, motherhood, fatherhood, have called forth the profoundest thought and speculation. From the contemplation of these strange phenomena sprang the esoteric doctrines of Egypt and the East, with their horrible accompaniments of vice and depravity; the same thoughts, low and terrible, hovered before ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... lord with a son, she was raised to the rank of Empress and began to exert no little influence in the character of mother to an heir-apparent. Had she not been protected by her new rank her childless rival might have driven her from court and appropriated the boy. She had instead to admit a joint motherhood, which in a few years ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... it said, the motherhood in the Master Builder's wife had triumphed over her natural terror at the thought of the infection. When her husband had brought her the news that Frederick was in one of the old shop buildings, awaiting her permission (after what had occurred) to enter the house; ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... and inferior in his grasp of religious truth to such sages of Greece as Socrates and Plato. In his system also woman is practically a slave. She is simply the minister of man, and therefore unable to rear up children, sons who would reflect the greatness of soul of a noble motherhood. It has often been remarked that great men have had great mothers. I think experience and observation will bear out this statement. Glance over the pages of history, and eminent examples will rise up before the view. Whence ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... 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 ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... 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
... Calvary, Into our own shall the mothers come, and the glad day speed apace When the law of peace shall be the law of the women that bear the race; When a man shall stand by his mother, for the worldwide common good, And not bring her tears and heart-break nor make mock of her motherhood. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... this conclusion. Writing on his novels, Mr. W. E. Henley called him "the great optimist." The Kreutzer Sonata is the work of a profound pessimist. Concluding What To Do, Tolstoi wrote a noble passage on the sacredness of motherhood. Now all that is changed. Motherhood must go too. It will take time, for the old Adam is strong in us. But go it must, and when we have all brought our bodies under, no more children will be born. The race will expire, having perfected its imitation of Christ, and the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... it! Alas, the echoing Of that wild havoc lingers in my brain! O wretched age, and injured motherhood, And hapless maiden-wreck! ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... Violante, remorseful for the sacrifice 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 have been) ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... flash the meaning of his wife's words rushed over the almost stupefied man! God! and he had not known! Tessibel, her new light of coming motherhood, cowered before him like a stricken thing. He sprang forward during Madelene's hesitation and grasped his wife's arm again. He was so furiously angry his tightening fingers brought a cry ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... with blessings from the two poor widows and Joseph. As to the newspaper, it ceased to exist at the end of two months, just as Finot had predicted. Philippe's crime had, therefore, so far as the world knew, no consequences. But Agathe's motherhood had received a deadly wound. Her belief in her son once shaken, she lived in perpetual fear, mingled with some satisfactions, as she saw ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... called up "bright pictures of boys and girls with their rosy cheeks and flashing skates,—a breeze of old associations." At Benares, various root ideas of Hindoo holiness were illustrated, including the linga worship and the passion for motherhood in that strange phallic cult which, from India to Japan, has survived all later forms of religion. In Calcutta, Old India had already been forgotten in the newer and more Christian India. He visited especially the American Union Mission Home, where Miss Louise ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... Scotch granite, with a human heart beneath. The veneer of gentility had underneath it the pure gold of character. She seized the helm of the family ship with a heroic hand. She sailed steadily through a sea of troubles that often threatened to overwhelm her; the unaccustomed task of motherhood with its hundred trials, her brother's gloom and despair, the new conditions of the rough country—even the irony of a fate that had set her at hard, uncongenial toil in the very place where she had sought culture. But she succeeded, and had not only held her own poise in the struggle, ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... girls, who would regret her absence from the workroom, and it was not without surprise that she caught herself wishing suddenly they were her own children. The wish was only momentary, but it was the first time a desire for motherhood had ever ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... defenceless against the men who had power over her fate (as all Arab women are defenceless, unless they choose death instead of life), appealed to the latent motherhood that slept in the heart of Sanda, as in the heart of every normal girl: appealed to the romance in her: appealed to the sympathy born of her own love for Stanton, which seemed as hopeless as Ourieda's love for Manoeel Valdez. Would ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... accepted it; but accepting it as you did, you were bound by every consideration to be true and loyal to that love and to him. Instead, from beginning to end, you have been false to him, false to his memory, false to your own wifehood and motherhood, false to yourself! I have not come here to reproach you, however. I will only say that I do not believe the capacity—the capability even—of love exists, or has ever existed, within you. But," he continued, in gentler tones, "the capacity for suffering does exist, ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... of my marriage with the Duke of Hereward, but had known me as the wife of the Count de Volaski, believed that all my distress was caused by the prospect of becoming the mother of a fatherless child, and bent all her energies to try to comfort me with the assurance that this motherhood would be the greatest blessing of ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... suffered I love best to think of her as she was that day—my sweet, beautiful, timid angel—standing up for one brief moment, not only against Aunt Bridget, but against the cruelty of all the ages, in the divine right of her outraged motherhood. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Mothers, for the first time in history, are able to assert, not only their inherent first right to the children they have borne, but their right to be a protective and purifying power in the political society into which those children are to enter. To fulfill, therefore, their whole duty of motherhood, to satisfy their whole capacity in that divine relation, they are called of God to participate with man in all the responsibilities of human life, and to share with him every work of brain and heart, refusing only those physical labors that are inconsistent with the exalted duties and privileges ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... his seat in the pavilion, and stood transfixed, helpless. "Nom de Dieu . . . que faire? Elle va mourir!" he muttered with shaking lips: and Elsie, child as she was, yearned over him with all the tenderness and pity of inherent motherhood. ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... now. George will act toward you only as your long worship of him, your sacrifices—all the unseen little ones every day since he was born—will make him act. Dear, it breaks my heart for you, but what you have to oppose now is the history of your own selfless and perfect motherhood. I remember saying once that what you worshipped in your son was the angel you saw in him—and I still believe that is true of every mother. But in a mother's worship she may not see that the Will in her son should not always be offered incense ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... rose is an emblem of pure motherhood. Like the opened radiant rose the Christian mother is in the full vigor of life; her heart open with true love for her husband and children; and she unfolds her soul to heaven, so that through prayer she may receive the needed assistance for herself ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... 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 lap ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... courts, where girls of tender age may be arraigned for the 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
... long life and great strength. I confess I should like to live for a good many years yet. I suppose Helen will marry by and by. I should like to be a witness of her happiness, rounded, full, complete, sanctified by motherhood. Think, Mary, of my holding Helen's children on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... 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 playing a part in the industrial field on a par with man. And society ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... been left undisturbed in her home, a consideration for which she and all who were concerned for her were devoutly grateful, and now she had passed through the portals of Gethsemane and the wide gates of Eden, in the bitter-sweet experiences of motherhood. ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... limited and illegal births encouraged. This was quite in accord with the doctrines of the Grand Orient, in whose Temples, Monsieur Copin Albancelli points out, the principle of "la libre maternite"—known in this country as "the right to motherhood"—was advocated. ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... 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 ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... vine-like tendency, yet she clung 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 ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... some strange 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 ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... ground the women's faces; You have coined their blood and tears for gold; Have betrayed their kisses and embraces— Returned their love with curses twentyfold; Made the wife's crown one of thorns and not of honor, Made her motherhood a pain and dread; Heaped life's toil unrecompensed upon her; Laid her sons upon ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... made the virgin for love; but with the first child her bosom loses form, her beauty its freshness. Woman is made for motherhood. Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the loss of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps. Behold the family, the human law; everything that departs ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... absolution for this separation which she would never have asked for herself. She had no conception that she was as disagreeable to Graslin as Graslin was repulsive to her. This secret divorce made her both sad and joyful. She had always looked to motherhood for an interest in life; but up to this time (1828) the couple had had no prospect ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... and as she looks upon them and strokes their long fair hair and listens to their laughter, she says to herself that it was perhaps almost worth while to have been dragged down towards the depths of shame for the sake of at last enjoying such pride and glory of happy motherhood. ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 incorporation ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Motherhood is the crowning triumph; it hallows any woman howsoever lowly or wicked. And you are neither, Charity. I know you to be good and busy in good works. But were you never so evil, this heavenly privilege would make of you a ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... consumed by eagerness. It was some slave girl busied among the vines of Abul Malek, he decided, for she translated all the fragmentary airs that float through summer evenings—the songs of sweethearts, the tender airs of motherhood, the croon of distant waterfalls, the voice of sleepy locusts—and yet she wove them into an air that carried ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... 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 ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the letter Henry's eyes glistened. Its emotion had awakened the crusader, who said gently: "Well, Bill, I presume it is the potential mother in every woman that makes her worth while. And if this war will only harness motherhood to the public conscience, the net gain will be worth the war, however it ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... strange in a nature so timorous that not once did a suspicion he had erred overtake him, and presently he wondered to observe how ancient this discovery of the motherhood of Chris had grown within his mind. It appeared as venerable as his own love for her. He yearned for power to aid; without conscious direction of his course he proceeded and strode along for hours. Then ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... us go back to an idyl little known of Marie's twelfth year. The fact itself is not very extraordinary. The little girl is training herself for motherhood by lavishing caresses on wretched papier-mache baby dolls. She is practising for her part of woman by playing at being in love. Artless little affairs outlined in the catechism, pervaded by the fragrance of incense. Very similar to these appears to us the ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... than sweep of angelic herald, quicker than aught else than Infinite quickening at human prayer, speeds the mystery of motherhood. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... occupied all the other half of the parlour, the harp's delicate constitution necessitated its standing in the hall. Nevertheless, Carroll had great comfort from it. While Orde was away at the office, she whispered through its mellow strings her great happiness, the dreams for her young motherhood which would come in the summer, the vague and lingering pain over the hapless but beloved ones she had left behind her in her other life. Then she arose refreshed, and went about the simple ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... of creeping vines, she was braiding rope for the Fishing. For some time, without speech, he watched her deft hands bringing law and order out of the unruly mass of curling fibres. She was good to look upon, swaying there to her task, strong-limbed, deep-chested, and with hips made for motherhood. And the bronze of her face was golden in the flickering light, her hair blue-black, ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... 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
... unnecessary trips to Chicago or Indianapolis whenever SHE took it into her head to go. Besides, it wasn't natural that they should deliberately put off having children. It wasn't what God and the country expected. After a year had passed and there were no symptoms of approaching motherhood, certain narrow-minded relatives began to blame Great Britain for the outrage and talked a great deal ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... wrong; so is it to rack her spine and upset or throw out of position all the delicate and wonderfully fashioned organs of the abdominal cavity by the wearing of high French heels. Undoubtedly, however, American motherhood and girlhood represent something more and more intelligent; indeed, in physical culture women are beginning to keep step with men, and it is upon this fact that school and college depend in their splendid efforts to make the ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... are born, neither father nor mother is fit to act the part of a parent to them. The father, by reason of his age, is fitful, uncertain, and childish; to-day too lenient, to-morrow too exacting. The mother is pettish, childish, indulgent, impatient, and as unskilled in government as unfit for motherhood. In the midst of all this misrule, the child grows up undisciplined, uncultivated, unsubdued; a misery to his parents, a disgrace to his friends, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... spirits, and spirit seeks unity and approach. Love is the one uniting and binding force in the universe, just as its opposite—hatred—is the disintegrating element. Love operates in attraction, as we see it in motherhood, childhood, and the love of man and maid. But it also works on the grand scale in the guise of the law of Gravity which attracts and binds universes together, and regulates and controls the swing of inconceivable immensities. Look again and we may ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... 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
... wronged those children by giving them the status of slaves and outcasts. He wronged their mother by imposing upon her the burdens and cares of maternity without the rights and privileges of a wife. He made her crown of motherhood a circlet of shame. Under other circumstances she might have been an honored wife and happy mother. And I do think such men wrong their own legitimate children by transmitting to them a weakened ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... courage, but also with a humor which, after the tragic hours of her youth, flowered out in her like something new and unexpectedly delightful. It must have been always there, but not till marriage and motherhood, and F.D. Maurice's influence, had given her peace of soul does it seem to have shown itself as I remember it—a golden and pervading quality, which made life unfailingly pleasant beside her. Her clear, dark eyes, with their sweet sincerity, and the touch in them of a quiet laughter, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... same time, my 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 ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... of horror. Instinctively her arms were interposed between the unconscious man and these inhuman creatures, with a beautiful gesture of protecting motherhood. ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... that something had gone wrong, came over and pushed his head beneath her arm; and with this she held him, while her other hand impulsively caught Dale's sleeve. A feeling of protectorship, a faint consciousness of motherhood, gave her face an exquisite look of entreaty. What men's lives might be had never taken a definite place in her mind, for she had accepted much and passed over more. But she was not pleading now so much ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... did so consider it, for from that day, whenever she was asked her name, she announced herself proudly as "Zordie's 'ittle wife, Thelma"—to the great amusement of her father, Sir Philip, and that other Thelma, on whom the glory of motherhood had fallen like a new charm, investing both face and form with superior beauty and an almost divine serenity. But "Zordie's wife" took her sobriquet very seriously,—so much so, indeed, that by-and-by "Zordie" began to take it rather seriously himself—and to wonder whether, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... out of their common life. 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 of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... own room, and threw herself on her bed and writhed there, torn by many pangs. The pang of the heart and the pang of the half-born spirit, struggling with the body that held it back from birth; and through it all the pang of the motherhood she had thwarted and disowned. Out of the very soil of corruption it pierced, sharp and pure, infinitely painful. It was almost indiscernible from the fierce exultation of her heart that had found fulfilment, and ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... wanders where the 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 ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... with eyes make good, Where Freedom rose, a lodestar to your race; And Hope that leaning on her anchor stood Did smile it to her feet: a right small place. Call her a mother, high such motherhood, Home in her name and duty in her face; Call her a ship, her wide arms rake the clouds, And every wind of ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... 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
... to Heaven and Earth together. The word dyaus is used hundreds of times, but generally in the meaning sky (without personification). There is, to be sure, a formal acknowledgment of the fatherhood of Dyaus (among gods he is father particularly of Dawn, the Acvins, and Indra), as there is of the motherhood of Earth, but there is no further exaltation. No exaggeration—the sign of Hindu enthusiasm—is displayed in the laudation, and the epithet 'father' is given to half a dozen Vedic gods, as in Rome Ma(r)spiter ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... normal phenomena of a woman's life is the recurring cycle of potential motherhood. Every three or four weeks a new ovum or egg matures in the ovary and undergoes certain chemical changes, which send into the blood a substance called a hormone. This hormone is a messenger, stimulating ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... generations past and pays the debt to the generations that follow. A certain percentage of the mothers die in childbirth—evidence that they are God's handiwork is found in the fact they so willingly enter the valley of the shadow of death to attain to motherhood. Many a boy has been won back to rectitude by the sorrows of a parent; we are not infrequently healed by the stripes that fall on others. In fact, great wrongs are seldom righted without the shedding of innocent blood—one dies ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such people hold mothers ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... but have you taken into consideration the fact that Violet's extreme youth must render her unfit for the cares and responsibilities of motherhood ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... realised not only that the Labour movement could give the secret of success to the woman movement by its method and organization, but that on the other hand, woman held the secret without which labour is impotent to reach its ends. Woman, by virtue of motherhood is the regulator of the birthrate, the sacred disposer of human production. It is in the deliberate restraint and measurement of human production that the fundamental problems of the family, the nation, the whole brotherhood of mankind find ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, (considering the advantages enjoy'd,) probably the meanest to be seen in ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... into silence. His dismay was not entirely ignoble; the situation was excruciating to a man whose feeling for beauty was a form of religion; his mortification had in it the element of horror for a profaned ideal; his mother was an esthetic insult to motherhood. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... 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 ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... is the end of it? Behold me here a barren stock, while the women of my youth have a troop of children at their side, and grandchildren at their knee I gave up the sweet joys of wifehood and motherhood for what? For my dear brothers. They have gone and left me long ago. For my art. It has all but left me too. I have the knowledge still, but what avails that when the hand trembles. No, Gerard; I look on you as my son. You are good, you are handsome, you are a painter, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... nice woman. Later on he finds her 'looking the very incarnation of home, with her cheerful healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress.... She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood—of Charity with a babe at her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had so evidently intended ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... seemed eager to pour out. Elsie French, whom Washington had known three years before as Elsie Maddison, was in that bloom of young married life when all that was lovely in the girl seems to be still lingering, while yet love and motherhood have wrought once more their old transforming miracle on sense and spirit. In her afternoon dress of dainty sprigged silk, with just a touch of austerity in the broad muslin collar and cuffs—her curly brown hair simply parted on her brow, and gathered classically on ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... boundaries and actually destroyed her instrument where the need for it ceased. Just because nature is elsewhere parsimonious, she seems frequently extravagant; yet that extravagance is the cheapest means of attaining the necessary end. Thus, when woman's passion is no longer required for the function of motherhood, its impulsion may yet be counted on for the psychological explanation of more than ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... queer and interesting children. But oh, most wonderful of all is the opposite panel that ought to be called Abundance. See that mother, holding her lusty baby. The face is commonplace enough, but it has all motherhood in it. And the woman behind, she looks as if she might be a mother bereft or one of those women cheated out ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... 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 ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... said, trying to speak with conviction. I added, hastily: "I'm glad you don't find motherhood disappointing." ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... Gertrude has set her heart on his doing a female figure; it seems that folk 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
... painter who worships his Madonna through the medium of his craft as some great lady, "empress of heaven and of earth." Rembrandt's picture, lacking this mysticism, gains, however, in humanity; and however far even from our modern point of view it may be as a creation embodying the divine Motherhood, it throbs with tenderness. The homely interior, the good mother, the almost pathetic abandon of the sleeping child—surely no painter ever wrought better, nor, we may be ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... what 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
... instinct of the motherhood latent in her, Roma understood the boy in a moment. "If I were a gentleman, ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... cushions of her chair, and her pretty foot was on the brass fender. There was a cordial warmth about her which turned the simple room into home for even the casual caller. The matronly grace of her movements evoked the memory of infancy and motherhood; to Nicholas Burr she seemed, in her beauty and her abundance, the supreme expression of a type—of the joyous racial mother of ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... of 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 ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Anna replied, "these are things for married women to hear;" and she provoked some contempt of her conventional delicacy, at the same time that in her imagination the image of Vittoria struggling to preserve this burden of motherhood against a tragic mischance, completely humiliated and overwhelmed her, as if nature had also come ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 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 other women, these mothers, call souls out of nothingness, ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... system founded on SWEDENBORGIANISM (q. v.) on the one hand and a form of communism on the other, with a scriptural Christianity spiritualised as backbone; the destiny of man he regards as angelhood, or a state of existence like that of God, in which the unity of sex, or fatherhood and motherhood, meet in one; the late Laurence Oliphant and the late John Pulsford were among his disciples; ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... should look up to him with reverence as her earthly guardian, the "saviour of the body," as St. Paul says, and be obedient. Does any wife say her husband is not worthy of this honor? Then render it to the office with which God has invested him as head of the family; but use your privilege of motherhood so to train your son that he may be worthy of this reverence and obedience from his wife. Thus through your sufferings the world may be made better; every faithful performance of private duty adds to ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... given 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 harsh or ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... they grope out to the great waters and the great winds—little sloops of life, on whose voyaging the future hangs. They go forth blind, feeling their way. Mothers, and you who will be mothers, and you who have missed motherhood, give them their chance, bless them with a gem—light ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... kiss her and stroke her hands and her face, but she never liked her to play at being the mother, nor had she ever encouraged her daughter in the occupations of a doll. She was the mother and Mary was the baby, and she could not bear to have her motherhood hindered ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... answer to him: "Ah me, my child, why reared I thee, cursed in my motherhood? Would thou hadst been left tearless and griefless amid the ships, seeing thy lot is very brief and endureth no long while; but now art thou made short-lived alike and lamentable beyond all men; in an evil hour ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... pleadings would be, yet not willing to give up hope, she wept, she prayed, she hung upon John Allan's neck. She brought every argument that starved motherhood could conceive to ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... I am talking now of the ordinary American mother, who is a mother in all that the term implies. We all know that there are women who have children without understanding at all—yes, or even caring at all—what motherhood means; without understanding or caring what their ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... of motherhood that can bring childhood back from the dust of the grave and banish the wrinkles and gray hairs of age with no other talisman than a ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... large family, Mrs. Fry endeavored to do her duty faithfully and lovingly. Twelve sons and daughters were given to her, trained by her more or less, with reference not only to their temporal welfare, but their spiritual also. In all the years of motherhood many cares attached themselves to her. Illness, the deaths of near relatives, and of one little child, the marriage of some of her children out of the Society of Friends, losses in business, and consequent reduction of household comforts and pleasures, the censure which sometimes followed her ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... shortness of life and nearness of eternity when I see how many that I have traveled with are gone within the veil. Then there are all my own letters, written in the first two years of marriage, when Mr. Stowe was in Europe and I was looking forward to motherhood and preparing for it—my letters when my whole life was within the four walls of my nursery, my thoughts absorbed by the developing character of children who have now lived their earthly life and gone to the eternal one,—my two little boys, each in their way good and lovely, whom Christ ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... thought that it was very hard upon the maternal hens—the hens which should have been maternal—that they should be thus robbed of the delights of motherhood. ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope
... beyond the time of motherhood were suckling infants, while all the young women seemed well provided with children. Girls of five or six were playing games with sleeping infants strapped to their backs, and even boys were impressed into this nursery work. The younger children are clothed only in kimonos, ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... mulatto of Tennessee had no such social or legal position as either of these cases indicate, although here again personal testimony brings to light notable exceptions of the social behavior of individuals in certain localities, where this type, that is, the colored offspring of white motherhood, was regarded as a separate class, above ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... bas-relief, or 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 ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... 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 mostly in love with Byron under various ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... 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 begins, just twenty. The passing ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... beauty of the Christ Child, The gentleness, the grace, The smiling, loving tenderness, The infantile embrace! All babyhood he holdeth, All motherhood enfoldeth— Yet ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... honour of both those conflicting interchangeable personalities in her hands; and, whether she were strong enough to adjust their differences or not, she must in no wise betray either of them. The latent motherhood in her cried out to protect and to shield them both, to spare them both. For in this stage of the affair, while the hallucinations of deadly fever—in a sense mercifully—confused her, its grosser ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... gradually cease from being her son, she saw THAT detail perish utterly; all that was left was master—master, pure and simple, and it was not a gentle mastership, either. She saw herself sink from the sublime height of motherhood to the somber depths of unmodified slavery, the abyss of separation between her and her boy was complete. She was merely his chattel now, his convenience, his dog, his cringing and helpless slave, the humble and unresisting victim ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a pupil, of course, and she had only come in response to the heart promptings of motherhood, white, black, or brown, to talk about her offspring to the strange woman who was to usurp a mother's place with her so many hours of each day. She was quite as voluble as American mothers are, and her daughter was quite embarrassed by her volubility. The child sat stealing ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... so long as the corpse remains in the tree and the flesh has not completely disappeared from the bones, the mother of the deceased and the women who stand to him or her in the relation of tribal motherhood are obliged from time to time to go to the tree, and sitting under the platform to allow its putrid juices to drip down on their bodies, into which they rub them as a token of sorrow. This, no doubt, is intended to please the jealous ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... were, on the whole, pleased with her experiment in vicarious motherhood. Dick instinctively resented the fact that Nancy had taken Collier Pratt's daughter into her home and heart, but the child herself was a delight to him, and he spent hours romping with her and telling her stories, loading ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... 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, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... her attention to His friend, St. John, who would be a son to her now that He was going away. Perhaps. But I like to think the other way: that He was revealing to that mother of His the thing that should justify her motherhood, and her faith, and her love. He was saying, as it seems to me, things ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... the room again Bertha began to talk of the far-away years of their childhood, but it seemed that Agatha had forgotten all about those early days, as though marriage, motherhood and week-day cares had obliterated both youth and its memories. When Bertha went on to speak of a students' dance they had both attended, of the young men who had courted Agatha, and of a bouquet which some unknown lover had once sent her, Agatha at first smiled rather ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... had become a little cynical with respect to the artistic coherence of Faust and looked on it as a "monstrosity." It was a part of the early plan that Faust should add to the burden of his soul by frivolously deserting Margaret in the shame of her approaching motherhood and spending some time in gross pleasures. The visit to the Witches' Sabbath on the Brocken was afterward invented to carry out this idea. In itself the idea was a good one; for if Faust was to drain the cup of sorrow, the ingredient of self-contempt could not be left out of the bitter ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... him. Tonight he thought of Marion and cast the thought away with a curse and a sneer. As for his mother—would his mother care so very much? Had he given her any reason for caring, beyond the natural maternal instinct which is in all motherhood? He did not know. If he could be sure that his mother would grieve for him—but he did not know. Perhaps she had grieved over him in the past until she had worn out all emotions where he was concerned. He wondered, and ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... an ideal which, as we are beginning to learn, it is possible to cultivate, both individually and socially. The day is coming, as Engel remarks in his useful book on The Elements of Child Protection, when fatherhood and motherhood will only be permitted to the strong. That is why the new science of eugenics or racial hygiene is acquiring so immense an importance. In the past racial selection has been carried out crudely by the destructive, wasteful, and expensive ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... courage, seaside time is coming. Within a few days, no doubt, an omnibus will come to the door empty, to go away full, filled with luggage, crowned by a perambulator and a baby's bath!" It is only a woman who can travel with a perambulator and a bath; they are the epitome of motherhood. A father is always too busy to go by that ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... 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 as ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... away that which was meant to be kept. The virgin keeping that which was meant to be given away. A force contending with a force. Drawing in opposite directions when they should be pulling together. Through it all, motherhood misunderstood. And fatherhood misunderstood. The body cheapened to the soul. And the soul cheapened to the body. Every child being a slap ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... sister, ready with head, heart, and hand to help them help themselves; not offering pity as an alms, but justice as a right. Hardship and sorrow, long effort and late-won reward had been hers they knew; wifehood, motherhood, and widowhood brought her very near to them; and behind her was the background of an earnest life, against which this figure with health on the cheeks, hope in the eyes, courage on the lips, and the ardor of a wide benevolence warming the whole countenance stood out full of unconscious dignity ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... mother. And so you will be deceived. "Marriage" was right, but "Parentage" was not the best word for the rest of the record. It refers to the birth of her own child. After a certain period of time "my babe was born." Marriage and Motherhood-Marriage and Maternity-Marriage and Product-Marriage and Dividend—either of these would have fitted the facts and made the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... generations from the divine fountain of life and light, our Father the Sun. I dreamt of Golden Star, and the days when I loved her in timid silence, for she was the fairest of all our race, and so, as it seemed to me, destined to no less a lot than the motherhood of a long line of Incas, in whom should live and grow to ever greater splendour the glories of the race that ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... tones were wrought to consonance with this noble human model, and he spoke of that ideal motherhood which, to every child at the bier, seems real as the dripping bucket at the fairy's well—of mother's love, trials, weakness, and immortality; of the absence of her sympathy making the first great bereavement in life's progress; of her nature abiding in us and her spirit hovering over, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... what Jim and his companion learned. He can learn to respect motherhood and to be considerate of mothers as mothers. It is very interesting to see the great differences in this regard between families in which the fact of motherhood is a secret, and those in which it is a matter of common knowledge. I was visiting a friend whose six-year-old boy knew that ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... 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
... Caroline to come and help him out with his mathematical calculations. Later, when a fine boy baby arrived in the Herschel solar system, Caroline forgave all and came to take care of what she called "the Herschel planetoid." She loved this baby as her own, and all the pent-up motherhood in her nature went out to the little "Sir John Herschel," the knighthood having been conferred on him by Caroline before ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... upon without admiration. I remember well the sweet dignity of her aspect, her "regal beauty," as Mr. Phillips truly styles it, and the charm of her serene and noble presence, which made her the type of a perfect motherhood. Her character corresponded to the promise of her gracious aspect. She was one of the fondest of mothers, but not thoughtlessly indulgent to the boy from whom she hoped and expected more than she thought it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... in homes made beautiful with all that gold can give Unhappy souls at odds with life, not knowing how to live. He saw fair, pampered women turn from motherhood's sweet joy, Obsessed with methods to prevent or mania to destroy. He saw men sell their souls to vice and avarice and greed; He heard race quarrelling with race and creed decrying creed; And shameful wealth and waste He saw, and shameful ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the girl. He was becoming more and more convinced that there existed an unaccountable and mysterious undercurrent of tragic possibilities at Adare House of which Josephine was almost ignorant, and her father entirely so. Josephine's motherhood and the secret she was guarding were not the only things that were clouding his mental horizon now. There was something else. And he believed that Jean was the key ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... story—incompatibility of temper, or rather of temperament. He had married at the age of thirty-eight, nine years ago. His wife was now twenty-eight. She was one of those women who can be got at only through their feelings—never through their reason. In her a passionate longing for motherhood had absorbed every other wish. She had money of her own and had gone to spend a year in Europe. When she left, Kellson experienced a deep sense of relief; a whole year's freedom seemed endless at the beginning, but now ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... touch us but lightly and are gone, leaving the eternal imprint! So long as she lived, Ruth would always remember that embrace. It was warm, shielding, comforting, and what was more, full of understanding. It was in fact the first embrace of motherhood she had ever known. Even after this woman had gone, it seemed to Ruth that the room was kindlier than it ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... and paternal kinship respectively in these two cases is obvious. They are recognised physically. But they are not used as part of the fabric of social institutions. Physical motherhood or fatherhood is nothing to these people, and one must learn to understand that there is wide difference between the mere physical fact of having a mother and father, and the political fact of ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... women, I am willing to take a back seat with 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
... 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 ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... arms round her neck and kiss away her tears, her poor hungry heart would have been fed with strong love, and might never have needed that fiery poison to still its cravings. Mighty is the force of motherhood! says the great tragic poet to us across the ages, finding, as usual, the simplest words for the sublimest fact—[Greek: deinon to tiktein estin.] It transforms all things by its vital heat: it turns timidity into fierce courage, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... been struck, the 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, ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... weariness, anything but interest. In the perplexity that had come upon him, Basil Morton seemed to have nothing more than his deserts. 'Best of mothers and of wives', forsooth! An excellent housekeeper, no doubt, but what shadow of qualification for wifehood and motherhood in this year 1886? The whole question was disgusting to a rational man—especially to that vigorous example of the class, by ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... the death-bed of her friend, now become Mme. Marie Gaston. Renee de Maucombe was married at the age of seventeen, upon leaving the convent. She gave her husband three children, though she never loved him, devoting herself to the duties of motherhood. [Letters of Two Brides.] In 1838-39 the serenity of this sage person was disturbed by meeting Dorlange-Sallenauve. She believed he sought her, and she must needs fight an insidious liking for him. Mme. de Camps counseled and enlightened ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... 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, ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... there were brief addresses by Dr. David Dearson on the disastrous results to motherhood should women participate in the active life of the nation; by the Reverend Jayson Yerkes on the Pauline doctrine of the subserviency of the truly feminine woman; by Mrs. Workman Werther on the decadence of feminine charm among women aping men's interests in life, and Crawford ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... 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 not come in ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... place in my thoughts, one truth has forced itself upon me: the predominant position of Woman in her natural relation to the race. The mother is the main stream of the racial life. All the hope of the future rests upon this faith in motherhood. ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... Yet the English mystic Julian, the anchoress of Norwich (c. 1400), insists on the motherhood as well as the fatherhood of God. "God is our mother, brother and Saviour." "As verily God is our father, so verily ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... straight away of the treasure and taken him into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child, with a few hours to think it over, could have seen the connection between my diving-dress and the loss of the Ocean Pioneer. A week after he left I went out one morning and saw the Motherhood, the salver's ship from Starr Race, towing up the channel and sounding. The whole blessed game was up, and all my trouble thrown away. Gummy! How wild I felt! And guying it in that stinking ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... 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
... of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which makes a mother—that miracle of nature which Raphael so perfectly understood—the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the opportunity of genius. She does not ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... trees Where God was walking in 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... may confront her offspring. Hence there is great need for proper instruction to wives, mothers, and, in fact, to all women in anticipation of the responsibilities of a home, and the obligations of motherhood. It has been well said that the training of children should begin with their grandparents. The character of the homes of the land, the moral and immoral bearing of every settlement, town, and city, in a large measure depend upon the class of women—upon the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... and abundant, and very black. A 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 from end to end, hardly ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... is 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 ...
— White Fang • Jack London
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