"Motherhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is affronted when a man avers that for him the glory of woman lies in her power of attraction, in her capacity for motherhood, and in unswerving allegiance to the ethics which ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... 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 her ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his tongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among the things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink. But the Philistines have been too strong; and, to say truth, Whitman had rather played the fool. We may be thoroughly conscious that his end is improving; that it would be a good thing if ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Pallas Athene of her people who carved or minted her image in statue, 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, ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... nothing to do with any desire to keep women curtained or captive: if such a desire exists. A husband would be pleased if his wife wore a gold crown and proclaimed laws from a throne of marble; or if she uttered oracles from the tripod of a priestess; or if she could walk in mystical motherhood before the procession of some great religious order. But that she should stand on a platform in the exact altitude in which he stands; leaning forward a little more than is graceful and holding her mouth open a little longer and ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the possibility of motherhood. Realizing this fact, one cannot fail to have a high idea of this function. Most girls, naturally, desire children. Little girls love their doll babies, and spend much time in caring for them, but as girls grow into womanhood they desire real babies. A woman who does not desire children ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... guardians of the race, and every normal woman desires children. Children are not a handicap in the race of life either, they are an inspiration. We hear too much about the burden of motherhood and too little of its benefits. The average child does well for his parents, and teaches them many things. Bless his little soft hands—he broadens our outlook, quickens our sympathies, and leads us, if we will but let him, into all truth. A child ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... I ever saw a gipsy who had grown fat. In Germany the gipsy women are often very pretty; but beauty is very uncommon among the Spanish gitanas. When very young, they may pass as being attractive in their ugliness, but once they have reached motherhood, they become absolutely repulsive. The filthiness of both sexes is incredible, and no one who has not seen a gipsy matron's hair can form any conception of what it is, not even if he conjures up the roughest, ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... personal charm afforded to escape drudgery and isolation. There was still deep-rooted in her a craving for something bigger than mere ease of living. She knew as well as she knew anything that in the natural evolution of things marriage and motherhood should have been the big thing in her life. And it was not. It was too incidental, too incomplete, too much like a mere breathing-place on life's highway. Sometimes she reasoned with herself bluntly, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... utmost to snare men, and failed. Of such sort are the majority of inflammatory suffragettes of the sex-hygiene and birth-control species. The rigid limitation of offspring, in fact, is chiefly advocated by women who run no more risk of having unwilling motherhood forced upon them than so many mummies of the Tenth Dynasty. All their unhealthy interest in such noisome matters has behind it merely a subconscious yearning to attract the attention of men, who are supposed to be partial to enterprises that are difficult or forbidden. But certainly ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... is the wisest, sweetest, most triumphant mother I have ever known. I am restrained by feelings of deepest reverence for her from speaking, as I might speak, of the rare and tender methods by which her motherhood has worked, patiently and alone, for nearly twenty years, and made of her two sons "lovers and friends." I have always felt that she owed it to the world to impart to other mothers all that she could of her divine secret; to write out, even in detail, ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... in the world is associated with it. For it was there that the young bride Mary visited her older cousin Elizabeth,—you remember the exquisite picture of the "Visitation" by Albertinelli in the Uffizi at Florence,—and the joy of coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and expectant soul of such a woman as Mary, ready to welcome ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... sentimentality, as far as I can see, to argue against special legislation for women. What women can do intellectually as compared with men I am in no position to state. To argue that women can take a place on a physical equality with man is simply not being honest. Without sentimentalizing over motherhood, it seems allowable to point out the fact that women are potential mothers, and this fact, with every detail of its complexities, feminists or no to the contrary, is a distinct handicap to women's ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... have twitted him with never having produced one. She has long been on the look-out for a model for him. It is odd to see this pale, demure, diaphanous creature, not the more earthly for approaching motherhood, scanning the girls of our village with the eyes ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... presence seemed to diffuse itself through the house. There was a sense of confusion and unrest, and the loud crying of a hungry baby determined to be attended to. And Joanna was fulfilling this duty, when Katherine hastened to meet her. Wifehood and motherhood had greatly altered the slim, fair girl of ten years before. She had grown stout, and was untidy in her dress, and a worried, anxious expression was continually on her countenance. Batavius kept an eye on the children; ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... nature; she demanded all the treasures of the heart, all the resources of strength; she filled his life and gave the zest of a conflict to happiness; whereas Amelie, chaste and confiding, would settle down into the sphere of peaceful motherhood, where the commonplace must be its poetry, and where my mind would find no ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... names. Bessie declared herself delighted with the chance of seeing Lady Ivinghoe, whom she considered more to realise the beauty of women than any one she had hitherto beheld, and the fair face had not lost its simplicity, but rather gained in loveliness by the sweetness of early motherhood, as she and Phyllis sat by Mysie, regaling her with tales of what they regarded as the remarkable precocity of the infant Claude, reluctantly left ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... has not the power of calling spirits out of the unknown into this earth life been intrusted to weak and sickly women? What the world loosely calls spiritualism is no isolated phenomenon or set of phenomena. The universe is spiritual. Much as we claim for our mediums, the mediumship of motherhood is far more marvellous. Our mediums can enable spirits already alive, and able by their own wills to cooperate, to pass before our eyes for a moment. To hold them longer in our view exceeds their power. But these ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... indescribable quality of womanliness—that quality which men have ever praised and ever will praise. Those noble words of Judge Sewall at the open grave of his mother are an epitome of the patience, the love, the sacrifice, and the nobility of motherhood: "Jany. 4th, 1700-1.... Nathan Bricket taking in hand to fill the grave, I said, Forbear a little, and suffer me to say that amidst our bereaving sorrows we have the comfort of beholding this saint put into the rightful possession of that happiness ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... awakened to real womanhood; she had fought the insidious spell of modernity and she had defeated it; she had learned the thrill of taking root in new soil, the pain and joy of labor, the bliss of solitude, the promise of home and love and motherhood. But she had gathered all these marvelous things to her ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... the beauty of the Christ Child, The gentleness, the grace, The smiling, loving tenderness, The infantile embrace! All babyhood he holdeth, All motherhood enfoldeth— Yet who ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... sterile were that soil Save as you planted. (Though in the Book we read One woman bore a child with no man's aid, We find no record of a man-child born Without the aid of woman! Fatherhood Is but a small achievement at the best, While motherhood comprises heaven and hell.) This ever-growing argument of sex Is most unseemly, and devoid of sense. Why waste more time in controversy, when There is not time enough for all of love, Our rightful occupation in this life? Why prate of our defects, of ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... proud of the somewhat rounded form of her waist. All women display an innocent artfulness, the first time they find themselves facing motherhood. Like a soldier who makes a brilliant toilet for his first battle, they love to play the pale, the suffering; they rise in a certain manner, and walk with the prettiest affectation. While yet flowers, they bear a fruit; they enjoy their maternity by anticipation. All those little ways ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... out of the intolerable position in which I had placed myself. I was in very bad health for a time, and my husband's affection for the alien child was more than I was able to bear. There is always a touch of the savage in motherhood, and I ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... Thackeray's novels Vanity Fair is the best known and most popular. It is a remarkable picture of a thoroughly hard, selfish woman whom even motherhood did not soften; but it is something more than the chronicle of Becky Sharp's fortunes. It is a panoramic sketch of many phases of London life; it is the free giving out by a great master of fiction of his impressions of life. Hence Vanity Fair alone is worth a hundred books filled merely with exciting ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... of the splendid motherhood that, in her sons, has contributed such wealth of manhood to the race. And, in her daughter, has given to human-kind such riches of womanhood. With kindest ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... the birth of a little daughter. The child was the idol of her father, and Penny's life was brightened by the joys of motherhood, in spite of the persistent refusal of Stephen Dale to hold any communication with her or allow ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett
... it produces pigmies. It needs men to fight; it produces men to run. It needs women with minds broad enough to think and hearts large enough to love. It needs motherhood that, while it bends protectingly over the cradle of its own child, reaches out a mother-heart to all the suffering childhood of the race. It needs the capacity for heroism; it yields the tendency to cowardice. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Carinthia Jane. She was her old father's pet; but Countess Fanny gloried in the boy. She had fancied she would be a childless woman before he gave sign of coming; and they say she wrote a little volume of Meditations in Prospect of Approaching Motherhood, for the guidance of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... indict the conspiracy of men that had driven her and her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... as they had left the creche he began to speak of the horror the babies in their incubating cases had caused him. "Is motherhood gone?" he said. "Was it a cant? Surely it was an instinct. This ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... Arkel; "her eyes are full of tears. It is her soul, now, that weeps. Why does she stretch her arms out so?—what does she wish?" "Toward her child, without doubt," answers the physician. "It is the struggle of motherhood against...." "At this moment?—At once?" cries Golaud, in a renewed outburst of anguish.... "Oh, oh! I must speak to her! Melisande! Melisande!—leave me alone with her!" "Trouble her not," gravely ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... floor, and stared in front of her.... Out of the dim past, almost as dim to her as to an animal, came a memory, the memory of a touch. The touch of a baby's hands feeling about her breast.... Not of Ishmael's in particular—how should she, whose motherhood had been so forced, so blurred a thing, keep one memory of it from another, or any that was not purely animal ...? But it was his picture she had been looking at which had brought the idea of babyhood back to her, and it was with him personally ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Peace—a study The Arab Lines on Hearing the Organ Changed First Love Wanderers Sad Memories Companions Ballad Precious Stones Disaster Contentment The Schoolmaster Arcades Ambo Waiting Play Love Thoughts at a Railway Station On the Brink "Forever" Under the Trees Motherhood Mystery Flight On the Beach Lovers, and a Reflection The Cock and the Bull An ...
— Fly Leaves • C. S. Calverley
... she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual is a ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... entirely without the sentiment which her son felt regarding the physical function of motherhood, for like the majority of sentiments, it had worn thin when it had been stretched over a continual repetition of facts. To Abel the mystery was still shrouded in a veil of sympathy, and was hardly to be thought of without tenderness. But his solicitude merely nettled Sarah. Nobody had ever "carried ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... worried. "Now I am unhappy!" he ejaculated. "What provokers to the wrong way are women! Her mother was like her—my beloved Adriana!" And his old eyes filled with sorrowful tears as he recalled the daughter he had lost in the first days of her motherhood. Very soon Sunna and Adriana became one and he was ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... moment the God you do not serve, and then for a moment the mammon you do serve. The God you do not serve is the Father of Lights, the Source of love, the Maker of man and woman, the Head of the great family, the Father of fatherhood and motherhood; the Life-giver who would die to preserve His children, but would rather slay them than they should live the servants of evil; the God who can neither think nor do nor endure any thing mean or unfair; the God of poetry and music and every marvel; the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... are three things sacred above all others: the first is motherhood; the second marriage; the third is ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... impossible to train personality and character. The father felt no responsibility for children that were not really his but his master's. The mother merely discharged the animal functions of bearing and rearing the child, all the finer instincts of motherhood being prostituted to a selfish commercial end. The slave-mother, of course, did not feel the pathos of the situation when pointing to her children she said: "Look missis! little niggers for you and massa; plenty little niggers for you and little missis." ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... each sister land, patient and cheerily wise, With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes, Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood, Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... summed up in this verity: 'It is a mother's duty to nurse her child.' And, besides, a mother, is she not the symbol of all grandeur, all strength, all beauty? She represents the eternity of life. She deserves a social culture, she should be religiously venerated. When we know how to worship motherhood, our country will be saved. And this is why, my friend, I should like a mother feeding her babe to be adopted as the highest expression of human beauty. Ah! how can one persuade our Parisiennes, all our French women, indeed, that woman's beauty lies in being a mother with an infant on her knees? ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... be succinctly stated—"the bride of three nights was not enceinte! Had she only possessed the attributes of coming motherhood, Lucrezia's origin might have been condoned. But surely it was foul cruelty which fixed the fault on her alone. As it was, the poor young Duchess was accorded at her husband's court the position of a ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... one she cried herself to sleep, craving the touch of the little rosebud baby learning of motherhood from ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... across her troublesome, disconnected thoughts. Mrs. Otway never heard those chimes without a wave of remembrance, sometimes very slight, sometimes like to-day quite strong and insistent, of past joys and sorrows. Those bells were interwoven with the whole of her wifehood, motherhood, and widowhood; they had rung for her wedding, they had mustered the tiny congregation who had been present at Rose's christening; the great bell had tolled the day her husband had died, and again to bid the kindly folk of Witanbury to ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... for the happiness she had once received from him. Oh! you need not be astonished at so horrible a conspiracy; it frequently takes place. Many women are more lovers than mothers, though the majority are more mothers than wives. The two sentiments, love and motherhood, developed as they are by our manners and customs, often struggle together in the hearts of women; one or other must succumb when they are not of equal strength; when they are, they produce some exceptional women, the glory of our sex. A man of your genius must surely comprehend many things ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... the times to come—serenity restored. For the moment the woman was forgetful of the foreshadowed days, happy that the warm, pulsing little body of her son lay unshrinking in her arms: so conscious of his love and life—so wishful for a deeper sense of motherhood—that she slipped her hand under his jacket and felt about for his heart, and there let her fingers lie, within touch of its steady beating. The lights still twinkled and flashed and aimlessly wandered in the night; but the spell of the river ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... again, a deep and sacred meaning in her words. Within her stirred the universal motherhood, the hope of everything, the call of the unborn, the insistent voice of the race that was ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... disturbed her, though she took no particular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy to think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge of the Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents in Italy, she had had to pass through such an arduous apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to remember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at times they were like an army with banners, and their power of self-multiplication ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... are noble, true, and chivalrous, you will not allow the sweet impulses of young and tender womanhood to be punished with the ban of felony. To you, women of France, I appeal in the name of your childhood, your girlhood, your motherhood; take her to your hearts, she is worthy of it, worthier now for having blushed before you, worthier than any heroine in the great roll of honour ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the parted soul, They have thanked the slender dole, And spoken of hope of days to come, And have forgotten their martyrdom. The anguished grief of motherhood Has firmly whispered "God is good And can in His Eternity Repay this present loss"; till I Have almost turned my head to see If Christ has ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... give you—all unasked you went, Sons of a greater motherhood than ours; To our proud hearts your young brief lives were lent, Then swept beyond us by resistless powers. Only we hear, when we have lost our all, That ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... stood there, reckless and daring, and absolutely fearless through her motherhood, there was a quick flash, another report, and the mother chamois, the pretty wife of Chaffer, of whom he had been so proud, dropped over the body of her baby and mingled her blood with his. She died quicker than Chaffer, ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... center of the first panel, as the symbol of worldly motive. Here, too, are primitive man and woman, bearing their burdens, symbolized by their progeny, into the unknown future, ready to meet whatever be the call of earth. The woman suggests the overwhelming instincts of motherhood. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... sufficiently to satisfy the needs of his masculinity; and she displayed the feminine unreason, at once so charming and irritating, with sufficient coquetry to freshen her love. Her greatest charm, however, lay in the dominant quality of brooding motherhood, the birthright of primal women and the very essence of femininity. After one of those sweet silences, she would steal on him from behind, and pull his head to her bosom with such a squeeze as a loving mother ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... a pensive frame of mind this morning. Two days before she had read a paper at the Institute on "Motherhood," which had been enthusiastically received. Mrs. Earle had printed a flattering item concerning it in the Benham Sentinel. It was agreeable to her to be going to meet Littleton, for he was the most interesting masculine figure in her life. She was sure of Lewis. He was her husband ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... in the conspiracy. Supposedly, they were keeping the young in a blessed state of innocence. As a matter of fact, other agencies were busy disseminating falsehoods. Most of our boys and girls, having no opportunity to hear sex and marriage and motherhood discussed with reverence, heard these matters discussed with vulgarity. While those interested in the welfare of the young withheld the truth, those who could profit by their downfall poisoned their minds with error ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... when the first evidences of motherhood manifest themselves, the husband procures a white or black chicken and after inviting a few friends, holds an informal party in honor of the occasion. I know of one case in which the ritual waving ceremony[1] took place on pregnancy, but ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... of those American matrons who do not allow marriage and motherhood to make vulgar physical impressions upon them. Her pale blue gown might have been worn by her daughter; her cool grey eyes looked out through a face without a wrinkle from a soul without a care. She was a patroness of art and intellect; but never did she forget her fundamental duty, the enhancing ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... city and bring out the women by the thousands. It would be the uprising of the women; the first upward step from sheer wage-slavery; the first advance toward the ideal of that coming woman, who should be a man in her freedom and her strength and her power, and yet woman of woman in her love and her motherhood and wife-hood. Industry, so Sally knew, was taking the young girls by the million, overworking them, sapping them of body and soul, and casting them out unfit to bear children, untrained to keep house, undisciplined to meet life and to be a comrade of a man. And Sally knew, moreover, ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... composer of the "Rex tremendae" (in the Requiem) wrote "Dove sono," Beethoven wrote both the finale of the Fifth symphony and the slow movement of the Ninth, Wagner both the Valkyries' Ride and the motherhood theme in "Siegfried," Handel "Worthy is the Lamb" and "Waft her, angels"; while your little malicious musical Mimes are absorbed in self-pity, and can no more write a melody that irresistibly touches you than they can build a great and impressive ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... think so sometimes.... We women, who are born capable of motherhood, seem to be fashioned also to realise Christ more clearly—and the holy mother who bore him.... I don't know if that's the reason—or if, truly, in us a little flame burns more constantly—the passion which instinctively flames more brightly toward ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... turn of mind should have induced her to enter a convent. Locks of soft golden hair escaped from her hood, intended to grow into long tresses, but she had allowed her hair to be cut. An ideal young mother, she seemed to Evelyn to be; and the thought of motherhood was put into Evelyn's mind by the story Angela was telling, for her counterpart had been drowned in Noah's deluge when he was four ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... that had never been realized. He was thinking that Margaret Gilbert was a fortunate and happy woman to have become Mother Carey; such a mother, too, that all about her was a wide, wide space, and next the space, the rest of the world, nearer or farther according to their merits. He wondered if motherhood ought not to be like that, and he thought if it were it would be a ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... had long since been submerged in an immeasurable motherhood and the best of cooks, would do the little thinking the house required, take charge of the old man's earnings, pay the rent and the burial club, and scheme little savings against Jenny's marriage—which she kept, not in an old stocking, but in a precious teapot of some old-fashioned ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... after all, savage doesn't mean anything but wild, untamed. You're that, you know, old lady. Untamed even by motherhood. And I'd have thought that would have tamed even Petruchio's handful. But this Maori woman I was thinking about was in the King Country in New Zealand—You know, I'd read 'The Blue Lagoon' and thought it ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... inculcated, will not avail much unless they are to some extent practised in the home. And this will never be the case so long as women are demoralised by the hard conditions of industrial life, and unfitted for the duties of motherhood ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... movies with their morbid emphasis on problems and crime and sex in preference to the cleancut American product which always satisfied the nobler feelings by showing the reward of the honest, the downfall of evildoers and the purity of love and motherhood. Art is all very well, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... she cried aloud. "I drink to ourselves, to women, to the gentle, to the homely, to happiness and purity! To motherhood! I drink to the sacred—" she broke off abruptly, sat down and hung ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the two peoples and the similarity of their civilizations, was our rival by necessity, our ill-wisher because of the past. The idea that we were bound to the mother country by ties of gratitude or affection he always combated. He denied her motherhood as a historical proposition, and demanded to know of Senator Butler, of South Carolina, who was moved to eloquence over America's debt to England for a language and a literature, whether he was duly grateful also for English criticism of our ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... listened while Tillie poured out her story. The gates were down now. She told it all, consistently and with unconscious pathos: her little room under the roof at Mrs. McKee's, and the house in the country; her loneliness, and the loneliness of the man; even the faint stirrings of potential motherhood, her empty arms, her advancing age—all this she knit into the fabric of her story and laid at Harriet's feet, as the ancients put their ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... understood The frequent joys of motherhood— To lick, from pointed tail to nape, The mewing litter into shape; To show, with pride that condescends, Your offspring to your human friends, And all our sympathy to win For every kit tucked ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... highest function, and, moreover, it is a function which it is unwise not to exercise; for it is infinitely more perilous for a healthy woman not to be a mother than it is for her to bear children. Motherhood, too, is the most markedly indicated function of a woman's body. She is specialized for it; it is the thing indicated. And yet we never say to a woman, Be a mother when you will; we hold up our hands in horror at the very thought of motherhood ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Paul, there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. "She is a queen of mothers!" she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. "I love her perfect love for you—for me, even! She is above all jealousy. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... Daily intercourse with a couple of hundred little street Arabs furnished a field for the practice of considerable feminine virtue, and in reality the woman's kingdom at the top of the broad wooden steps was a great 'culture engine' of spiritual motherhood. ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... charge for the rights of motherhood among the wealthy indifferent, and from a most important viewpoint. Price . . . . . ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... to grasp the flower, its eyes, unnaturally deep and wise with pain, were fixed upon Robinette's face. She bent over the chair, and her voice was like a dove's voice, Lavendar thought, as she spoke. Then the little melancholy carriage was wheeled away. Motherhood always seemed the most sacred, the supreme experience to Robinette; a thing high and beautiful like the topmost blooms of Nurse Prettyman's plum tree. "If one had to choose between that sturdy boy and this wistful wraith, it would be hard," she thought. "All my pride would run out to ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... strengthened by cruel trials, was far indeed from the common run, and men did justice to it. Such a soul necessarily required a lofty passion; and the affections of Madame de Dey were concentrated on a single sentiment,—that of motherhood. The happiness and pleasure of which her married life was deprived, she found in the passionate love she bore her son. She loved him not only with the pure and deep devotion of a mother, but with the coquetry ...
— The Recruit • Honore de Balzac
... my business and delight now—but you will soon have to do for others what I am doing for you. You like this easy life at present, but you can hardly imagine how interesting it is to have some one given you for your own, as you were given to me. It is the delight of motherhood and fatherhood in one; and when I was allowed to take you away out of the room where you lay—I admit it was not a pleasant scene—I felt just like a child who is given a ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... have been unwilling to teach school children the evils of violating sex hygiene, we have been unsuccessful in combating evils justly attributable to ignorance on the part of girls as to the duties and dangers of motherhood." This point of view is shared by so many men and women that a national body was organized in 1905 to promote the teaching of sex hygiene,—the Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. This society has its headquarters ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... fatherhood and motherhood God has given the special distinction above all estates that are beneath it that He not simply commands us to love our parents, but to honor them. For with respect to brothers, sisters, and our neighbors in general He commands nothing higher than that we ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... so much, then?" And she laughed disdainfully. Then with a sudden sternness, a sudden nobility almost in the motherhood which she put forward—"Rotherby is my son," she said, "and I'll not have my son the victim of your follies as well as of your injustice. We may curb the one and the ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty,—a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood. ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... chorus of love and benediction of the choirs within, as, with new hints of devotion in their patient faces, they folded their own little ones closer with some vague, struggling, incomprehensible sense of aspiration—they were one with their Royal Lady and the Blessed Madonna, in the sacred mystery of Motherhood. ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... man, as a sex, for protection and support. This is true quite apart from economic considerations or from those arising from the relative physical strength of the sexes. The prime function of woman, biologically, is that of motherhood. She is, so to speak, mother in a much more important and more pervasive sense than man is father. In the case of woman, her functions are of necessity subordinated to this one. With man this is not the case. It is with the woman ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... day or night convenient to herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... softening. His homing instinct, as blind as that of a domestic animal, his rejoicing in his return, his childish plan for taking his mother by surprise, even his loyalty to the tramcars and all the busy littleness of Clapham Junction—these touched something in her akin to the goodness of motherhood. It occurred to her that perhaps he had been better off under the lights of the cafe than alone on his way to his bed; and at that moment the three men at the next table, their conference over, rose and went out. She sat still till they were clear; then, on an impulse of officiousness, got up ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... granite-faced quays, whose greatest afflictions are the occasional overflow of the Neva and the dynamite habit, was spoken into being by a monarch. Necessity stands sponsor for Venice, the beautiful, with her streets of water-ways and airs of heavenly harmony; while nature herself may claim motherhood of Swedish Stockholm, brilliant with intermingling lakes islands and canals, rocks hills and forests, rendering escape from ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... dry land illustrates the absolute formations instituted by Mind, 507:3 while water symbolizes the elements of Mind. Spirit duly feeds and clothes every object, as it appears in the line of spiritual creation, thus tenderly expressing the father- 507:6 hood and motherhood of God. Spirit names and blesses all. Without natures particularly defined, objects and subjects would be obscure, and creation would be full of 507:9 nameless offspring, - wanderers from the parent Mind, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... marriage with Oscar's mother, and without in the least condemning her, he knew very well that Oscar was a posthumous child. His nephew, therefore, seemed to him to have no claims on the Cardot family. But Madame Clapart, like all women who concentrate their whole being into the sentiment of motherhood, did not put herself in Cardot's place and see the matter from his point of view; she thought he must certainly be interested in so sweet a child, who bore the maiden ...
— A Start in Life • Honore de Balzac
... no punishment. The tender little creature grew as a blossom grows from bud to fairest bloom. His mother flowered as he, and spent her days in noble cherishing of him and tender care. Such motherhood and wifehood as were hers were as fair statues ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... To permit each other freedom was blank dishonor. That I and Anna should love, and after our love-journey together, go about our separate lives and dine at the public tables, until the advent of her motherhood, would have seemed a terrible strain upon our unmitigable loyalty. And that I should have it in me to go on loving Nettie—who loved in different manner both Verrall and me—would have outraged the very quintessence ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... years. Patient, stupid, toilsome, unimaginative, kindly little lives, I daresay. Not much interested in one another, ill educated, gossipy, brutish, superstitious, but surprised perhaps into sudden passions of love, and still more surprised perhaps by the joys of fatherhood and motherhood; with children of all ages growing up, pretty and engaging and dirty and amusing and naughty, fading one by one into dull and sober age, and into decrepitude, and the churchyard at ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... I referred to the great responsibilities of motherhood, and doubtless your mental comment was, "Yes, that is woman's peculiar sphere; there she should be content to remain." It is our sphere—beautiful, glorious, almost infinite in its possibilities. We accept the work; we only ask for opportunity ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... them. It seems to me that every man who had a mother should have a proper regard for womanhood. My own mother was a combination of all the best elements of the high character that belong to true wife and motherhood. Her devotion and friendship were as eternal as the very stars of heaven, and no misfortune could dwarf her generous impulses or curdle the milk of human kindness in her good heart. Her memory has been ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... promise of ripeness which bid fair to be redeemed. A few omens, however, remained, disquieting when those who loved her thought of them. One was that she got no human speech, though she understood everything that was said to her; another that she showed no signs of motherhood; a third that Bessie Prawle could not abide her. She alone of all the little community avoided the King household, and scowled whensoever she happened to cross the path of this gentle outland girl. Jealousy ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... roused by some of the strange facts collected by the writer? So women everywhere—many women at any rate—were turning indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes, affections, servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the individuality and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and life-long marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their own fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools; casting away the old props and veils; determined, apparently, to know everything, however ugly, and to say everything, however outrageous? ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as the sunshine. It is sunshine at second-hand. It illuminates, but indistinctly. It beautifies, but it does not vivify or fructify. It comes indeed from the sun, but in too roundabout a way to do the sun's work. So, if a woman is pretty nearly sanctified before she is married, wifehood and motherhood may finish the business; but there is not one man in ten thousand of the writers aforesaid who would marry a vixen, trusting to the sanctifying influences of marriage to tone her down to sweetness. A thoughtful, gentle, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... their school. To one of these followers of Praxiteles, some say as a copy of a work of the master himself, we must attribute the Demeter now in the British Museum. This is a pathetic illustration of suffering motherhood. There is no exaggeration in the grief, only the calm dignity of a sorrow which in spite of hope ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... excitable motherhood took alarm. "I never heard," she said quickly, "that breathing in coal-tar smells ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... ceased and her pulse grew faint and fainter. Outside, the rain and sleet beat on the cracked window-pane, but a peace had entered the dingy little room. Kate received the great summons with a smile, for in one fleeting moment she had felt for the first and last time the blessed sanctity of motherhood. ...
— Lovey Mary • Alice Hegan Rice
... giving her a form of singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth—that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... said she was deformed; another suggested some hidden fault; but the poor girl was really as pure as a saint, as healthy as an infant, and full of loving kindness; Nature had intended her for all the pleasures, all the joys, and all the fatigues of motherhood. ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... to do the "nursing." There is no genuine nurse but the mother; and although others may do well under her eye and directed by her, she can never shift the mother-responsibility to other shoulders; and if she be worthy of the dignity of motherhood, she will never ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... true and healthy egoism towards altruism. But she travelled on another road and made jackets for the babies of strangers. Was that a better, a nobler thing to do? It stood for so much, and yet was nothing but fear of the burden of motherhood, and it was cheaper and less fatiguing to sit in the corner of a comfortable sofa and make little jackets than to bear the toil and broil of a nursery. It was looked upon as a disgrace to be a woman, to have a sex, to become ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... sun with its brothers, or run at the gentle call of its mother when she brings home game for it to feed on, the baby Coyote becomes one of the cutest, dearest little rascals on earth. And when the nine that made up Coyotito's brood had reached this stage, it did not require the glamour of motherhood to make them objects of ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... of kindred nature, how many of the stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from the tree of life which is ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... baby didn't cry very long. Seemed like it knowed there wuz a mother holdin' it,—not its own mother, but a woman whose life hed been hallowed by God's blessin' with the love 'nd the purity 'nd the sanctity uv motherhood. ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... is intended as a companion volume to "Child-Life in Art," and is a study of Madonna art as a revelation of motherhood. With the historical and legendary incidents in the life of the Virgin it has nothing to do. These subjects have been discussed comprehensively and finally in Mrs. Jameson's splendid work on the "Legends of the Madonna." Out of the great mass ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... makes its essay at the destiny of mankind. So imagination fashions its pictures. And back of philosophy and imagination we trace the elemental and highest forces of the soul. It is martyrdom and motherhood that inspire the immortal hope. Man faces the worst that can befall him—drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture—rather than be false to duty. The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... lips of Frederick; another followed from those of Tess. The minister's daughter was throwing the motherhood of the babe upon her. Teola had branded her squatter savior with a nameless child—a horror from which the student shrank! She saw unbelief rise quickly in his eyes, and saw him draw aside his long rain-coat as it almost touched the box upon ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... them both, Lancelot, and found them wanting; and now but one road remains. . . . Home, to the fountain-head; to the mother of all the churches whose fancied cruelty to her children can no more destroy her motherhood, than their confest rebellion can. . . . Shall I not hear her voice, when she, and she alone cries to me, "I have authority and commission from the King of kings to regenerate the world. History is a chaos, only because mankind ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... Motherhood is a career for which especial talents are required. Very few women know how to bring up children properly. If you don't believe it, look at the difference between our angelic offspring, and the little imps next door! It is as unreasonable to suppose ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... of spinach and a profane starling or woodpecker bustles off her nest with shrewish outcry and lingers nearby to rail at me. Abashed, I stealthily scuffle back to get a spade out of the tool bin and again that shrill scream of anger and outraged motherhood. A throstle or a whippoorwill is raising a family in the gutter spout over the back kitchen. I go into the bathroom to shave and Titania whispers sharply, "You mustn't shave in there. There's a tomtit nesting in the shutter hinge and the light ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... a woman whom no child called mother! But thank God the instinct is not one that can be dammed up or lost, and in these writings we get a glimpse of that motherhood which was hers, and which her life showed to be deep enough and wide enough to sweep under its wing the human souls, men, women, and children, who, passing near it, and being in need, cried out for help, and never cried in vain. To quote ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... been soaked out of her long ago by those hot, steaming suds that enveloped her the greater part of her waking hours, and left her physically, mentally, and morally limp. Her one strong instinct was motherhood; but five little Flathers, opening feeble eyes on their future environment, had become so discouraged that they promptly closed them again. It was as if they really could not stand the prospect of life in that home with Mr. and Mrs. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... fellowmen, and, as a certain consequence, more unable to bear the little crosses and contradictions of daily life; and as Lucia, having brought one and another child safely into the world, settled down into motherhood, he became less and less attentive to her, and more and more attentive to that self which was fast becoming ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... swallowed by the chimney. Some of them sit on the doorsteps, nursing their unwashed babies at bosoms which we will glance aside from, for the sake of our mothers and all womanhood, because the fairest spectacle is here the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark abodes, is strangely identical with what we have all known it to be in the happiest homes. Nothing, as I remember, smote me with more grief and pity (all the more poignant because perplexingly entangled with an inclination ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... opportunity my scorned profession gives me for knowing the human heart. This woman who comes to me cries: 'If I had only married I should have known the joy of companionship, of motherhood, and children growing up around me,' And this one wails: 'I have made a mistake. If I had not married and been condemned to a humdrum life what a noise I might have made in the world with my gifts and my beauty,' There is only one good, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... her efforts to do her duty to her sister's child, and it seemed to me that her face grew softer and her voice gentler as she went over the years they had grown older together, while the beauty of this woman's life was glorified by the willing sacrifices of imposed motherhood. I could not see Phyllis, for she was spending the night with friends in another part of the village. Next time, she hoped, I might be ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... be safety for the home and the family so long as babies are robbed of their mothers' care; so long as little children are made to do the work of men; so long as the girls who are to be the wives and mothers are sent into wifehood and motherhood unprepared, simply because the years of maidenhood are spent in factories that ought to be spent in preparation for wifehood and motherhood. Here is capitalism cutting at the very heart of the home, with Socialism ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... certainty of her ultimate goodness of heart; and it was nothing against this that she had abandoned herself a moment, that day on the cliff, to the sentiment of relief at the ending of her bondage, of her years of starved sympathy and unquickened motherhood. That she had turned to Marlowe in her destitution he believed; that she had any knowledge of his deadly purpose ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... seed should be abundantly scattered over the earth. Parenthood, therefore, was the great career. But while men, in addition to begetting, might busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was motherhood. To be left an old maid became, accordingly, the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl; and to ward off that calamity the girl and her family, to the most distant relatives, would strain every nerve, whether by contributing to her dowry, or hiding her ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... maidenhood, blushing and sweet, When Douglass first poured out his love at her feet; And not when a shrinking and beautiful bride, With worshipping fondness she clung to his side; And not in those holiest moments of life, When first she was held to his heart, as his wife; And never in motherhood's earliest bliss, Had she tasted a ...
— Beechenbrook - A Rhyme of the War • Margaret J. Preston
... boat, though the waves dash high, and the skies are dark—we will man and woman the life-boat—side by side will the two great forces stand, the Motherhood and the Fatherhood, Love and Justice, the hope and strength of Humanity shall stand at the hellum. The wind is a-comin' up; it is only a light breeze now, but it shall rise to a strong power that shall waft us on to the New Land of ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... mother of God and man, the instrument of reproduction, of tender care, of motherhood, the disputatious, groping mind of man agreed to bow, silenced and awed by ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... body of her child in the divinest love ever manifested on earth. Its birth and manifestation are of the immortal spirit, and create in her offspring some consciousness of, some desire for immortality. Of all earthly phenomena this of motherhood is the most marvelous, and naturally the least understood, and the most slightingly regarded. Its universality reduces it ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... she the mother of his foe, He will not speak to her in hate; My boy will never stoop so low As motherhood to desecrate. But she shall know what once I knew— Eyes that are glorious to see, The light of manhood shining through— Because ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest |
