"Womanhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and beauty she possessed. Could it be possible that this young and beautiful girl had been a chattel, with no power to protect herself from the highest insults that lawless brutality could inflict upon innocent and defenseless womanhood? Could he ever again glory in his American citizenship, when any white man, no matter how coarse, cruel, or brutal, could buy or sell her for the basest purposes? Was it not true that the cause of a hapless people had become ...
— Iola Leroy - Shadows Uplifted • Frances E.W. Harper
... on the other hand, their celibacy is deliberate, if it proceeds from a desire for independence, neither men nor mothers will forgive their disloyalty to womanly devotion, evidenced in their refusal to feed those passions which render their sex so affecting. To renounce the pangs of womanhood is to abjure its poetry and cease to merit the consolations to which mothers ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... the Stetson hat and the eternal revolver completing her costume. The ready-made clothes from Sydney had transformed her. A simple skirt and shirt-waist of some sort of wash- goods set off her trim figure with a hint of elegant womanhood that was new to him. Brown slippers peeped out as she crossed the compound, and he once caught a glimpse to the ankle of brown open-work stockings. Somehow, she had been made many times the woman by these mere extraneous trappings; and ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... usually opposed to this vice of sullenness is Alacritas, uniting the sense of activity and cheerfulness. Spenser has cheerfulness simply, in his description, never enough to be loved or praised, of the virtues of Womanhood; first feminineness or womanhood ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... age of budding womanhood when sensitive girls are apt to misunderstand a jest. She blushed, stammered something, then forced a laugh, and turned to speak to Robin; but Sam perceived that tears rose to her eyes, and he instantly sank in his own estimation to the condition of ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... leave unaided according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of the higher phases of manly character begins in this;—in truth and modesty before the face of all maidens; in truth and pity, or truth and reverence, to all womanhood. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of the children; whether they returned to their "ain countrie," to grow up to womanhood within the halls of Thirlstane, "the glass of fashion and the mould of form," or early slept on the hill side of Selkirk, covered by the heath and shaded by the broom. Perhaps at this moment they live in a green old age, the chronicles of that fated period, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... in silence. Nell was leaning back against the washtubs, her sleeves rolled up, her head tilted quizzically, lips parted, while tints of colour ebbed and flowed in her throat and cheeks. She had attained the ripeness of womanhood and very nearly animal perfection. The man's attitude might have told her this. One of his eyes, beneath a permanently cocked eyebrow, blinked like the shutter of a camera and seemed to take intimate photographs of all parts of her person. The other ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Her eyes were not resting on decent poverty, but upon uncouth, repulsive want; and this awful impoverishment was not seen in the few articles of cheap, dilapidated furniture so clearly as in the dull, sodden faces of the man and woman who kennelled there. No trace of manhood or womanhood was visible—and no animal is so repulsive as ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... unselfish disposition on their parts, several of them were respectively ready to take her to a circus-matinee, or to drive in Central Park, on that very day: and her prompt acceptance of these signal evidences of a disinterested friendship for womanhood without a natural protector could not be more simply indicated to those who now freely offered such friendship, than by her dropping her fork twice at the public breakfast table, or sending the waiter back three times with the boiled eggs ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various
... peremptory. "Shame on ye, to be cow'd thus by a graven image—a popish idol—a bit of chiselled stone. Out upon it, that nature should have put women's hearts into men's bosoms. Nay, 'tis worse than womanhood, for they have the stouter stomach for the enterprise, I trow. Bring hither the hammer, I say. Doth the foul apprehension of a trumpet terrify you that has been dead and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... of her, for she was of full womanhood,—thirty-three years old; the age at which the French connoisseur said that a charming woman charmed ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... how many ways men had of being antipathetic; these two were very different from Basil Ransom, and different from each other, and yet the manner of each conveyed an insult to one's womanhood. The worst of the case was that Verena would be sure not to perceive this outrage—not to dislike them in consequence. There were so many things that she hadn't yet learned to dislike, in spite of her ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... laughed. Upon the whole, he rather liked the look of astonishment in his sister's gray eyes, and the air of puzzled disapproval in her manner. He regarded ignorance on a great many matters as the natural and admirable condition of womanhood. ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... womanhood, With trained voice and ripened art, She gently stands where once she stood, And sings from out her deeper heart. Sing on, dear Singer! sing again; And we will listen to the strain, Till soaring earth greets bending Heaven, And seven-fold songs ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... unfeigned inward humility, as far removed from servility on the one side as from assumption on the other, and less the opponent than the offspring of self-respect, his thorough gentleness, guilelessness, deference, his manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such alone, as lead womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roaring, rollicking Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men, whoever, whatever, and wherever you are, with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... burdened with no thought of danger. There were times, now, when the thought of being alone was pleasant to her, when she wanted to dream by herself, when she visioned things into the mysteries of which she would not admit even Pierrot. She was growing into womanhood—just the sweet, closed bud of womanhood as yet—still a girl with the soft velvet of girlhood in her eyes, yet with the mystery of woman stirring gently in her soul, as if the Great Hand were hesitating between awakening her and letting ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... parks, and farms great and small, scattered through several counties, he is the greatest radical in England. He distances the Chartists altogether in his programme, and adds several new points to their political creed. He not only advocates manhood suffrage, but womanhood suffrage, and woman-seats in Parliament. Then he is a great friend of a reform which the Chartists grievously overlook, and which would make thousands of them voters if they would adopt it. That is, Total Abstinence from Tobacco, as well as from Ardent Spirits. ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... low for high truth sometimes, as we gather necessary fruit on nethermost boughs and dig the dirt for treasure. The Anglo-Saxon girl lying in the bed and the young African girl kindling her fire—these two, the highest and the humblest types of womanhood in the American republic—were inseparably connected in that room that morning as children of the same Revolution. It had cost the war of the Union, to enable this African girl to cast away the cloth ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... hundred years of education in a republic, she asked more than a simple recognition of the products of her hand and brain; with her growing intelligence, virtue and patriotism, she demanded the higher ideal of womanhood that should welcome her as an equal factor in government, with all the rights and honors of citizenship fully accorded. During the entire century, women who understood the genius of free institutions had ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... and was listening to the application of the moral, (which said application she was old enough to have made herself, but her grandmother still continued to treat her, in many respects, as a child, and Rosamund was in no haste to lay claim to the title of womanhood,) when a young gentleman made his appearance and ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... friend to it. And here it is to be known that all goodness inherent in anything is loveable in that thing; as in manhood to be well bearded, and in womanhood to be all over the face quite free from hair; as in the setter to have good scent, and as in the greyhound to be swift. And in proportion as it is native, so much the more is it delightful. Hence, although each virtue is loveable in man, that is the most loveable in him which ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... surprised, for this, although the same May, was very different from the girl he left behind him. The angles of girlhood had given place to the rounded lines of young womanhood. The rich curly brown hair, which used to whirl wildly in the sea-breezes, was gathered up in a luxuriant mass behind her graceful head, and from the forehead it was drawn back in two wavy bands, in defiance of fashion, which ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... dominion to be exercised over an ignorant people. Par from him is the thought of promoting the allegiance of the mass to scientific authority by withholding from them scientific knowledge. He holds it the duty of society to bestow on every one who grows up to manhood or womanhood as complete a course of instruction in every department of science, from mathematics to sociology, as can possibly be made general: and his ideas of what is possible in that respect are carried to a length to which few are prepared to follow him. There ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... justification, therefore, in mothers keeping their sons out of "long pants" as long as possible, and in fathers (for it is they who are the chief objectors) in opposing their daughters' desire to don the dust-sweeping skirt that marks attainment to womanhood. Here, however, it is proper that the wishes of the younger generation triumph. It is a social instinct to conform to the custom of one's fellows, and the children have reached "the age of consent" in matters of fashion. Their fathers and mothers may lend their influence to ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... of man: These two, a maiden and a youth, were there Gazing,—the one on all that was beneath Fair as herself,—but the boy gazed on her; And both were young, and one was beautiful; And both were young,—yet not alike in youth. As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge, The maid was on the eve of womanhood; The boy had fewer summers, but his heart Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye There was but one beloved face on earth, And that was shining on him; he had looked Upon it till it could not pass away; He had no breath, no being, but in hers; She was his voice; he did not speak to ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... way, paying but little heed to the whirl and excitement of the large cities, and plodding on with machine-like regularity in their daily pleasures, and their slow but sure acquirement of fortune. Children were born, much in the usual manner of such events—grew into man and womanhood—were married, and they—in their turn, raised families. Altogether, life in this old town partook very much of the monotonous and uneventful existence of ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... you shorely mean that, Tom Gordon?" she said; and the lips which lent themselves so easily to scorn were tremulous. She was just his age, and womanhood was only a step ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... not seem so long ago; while I, floating round the world, had gathered experience enough to make me feel, if not look, something older. At the porch we were met by Maude, her slight girlish figure rounded into the perfection of womanhood, the rich bloom of her cheek not quite as deep perhaps; but the sweet blue eyes met mine with all the old frankness, the charming naivete that had rendered her so much a favorite ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... think you wanted me to come back. I never expected you to be looking for me, and when I saw you doing it, my heart nearly stopped for gladness. I thought you were wearied of me, and would be annoyed when you saw me coming back. I said to myself, 'If I go back I shall be a disgrace to womanhood,' But I came; and now do you know what my heart is saying, and always will be saying? It is that pride and honour and self-respect are gone. And the terrible thing is that I don't seem to care; I, who used to value them so much, ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... was an orphan whose parents had died when she was quite a child. I had taken her to my home, and had raised her as my own daughter. How sweet-tempered, how loving she was! She had grown to womanhood with all the attractions of her sex, and, although not a beauty in the sense usually given to that word, she was looked upon as the handsomest girl of St. Gabriel. Her soft, transparent hazel eyes mirrored her ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies
... fire, no brains to weigh your arguments; that, after education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our birthright of liberty, to save from a timely death an effete political organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be: "No compromise of human rights"—"No admission in the Constitution ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... admirer. But the poem reveals a humorous side of his character, differing from what one finds in his published poetry, and it is probable that neither Mr. Whittier nor his young friend, who died in her early womanhood, would have objected to the publication ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... was only beginning to creep to the deeper contours of womanhood, a half curve here and there, a sudden softness in the youthful lines, certain angles trembling on the slightest of rolls, a hint, a suggestion, the shadowy prophecy of circles and half hoops that could not yet roll: the trip ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... species were correct. Love, gratitude, reverence, benevolence,—which all moved in mighty tides in his soul,—were all compelled to pause midway while he rubbed up his optical instruments to see whether they were rising in right order. Mary, on the contrary, had the blessed gift of womanhood,—that vivid life in the soul and sentiment which resists the chills of analysis, as a healthful human heart resists cold; yet still, all humbly, she thought this perhaps was a defect in herself, and therefore, having confessed, in a depreciating ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... gaze made her wonder. His eyes clung to hers for a long moment, left them to travel swiftly up and down the sweet young body that was no longer the body of "just a girl," noted how wonderfully the promise of girlhood had been fulfilled in budding womanhood, came back to her hair and throat and smiling mouth, rested again ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... John." She had not yet the gift of fancy, long denied to some in the emergent years of approaching womanhood. "I am tired, John," she said, as she dropped with hands clasped behind her head and hidden in the glorious abundance of darkening red hair, which lay around her on the brown pine-needles like the disordered aureole ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... girl, just rising into womanhood:—you must admit that she had a very lovely face, and ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... only of fulfilment. She was wasting cruelly away! Why should he leave her where she was? Leave her to profane herself and all womanhood in the arms of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... into his eyes, and saw that they were full of tears; but still she did not speak. Oh, Caroline Waddington, Caroline Waddington! if it had but been given thee to know, even then, how much of womanhood there was in thy bosom, of warm womanhood, how little of goddess-ship, of cold goddess-ship, it might still have been well with thee! But thou didst not know. Thou hadst gotten there at any rate thy Juno's pedestal; ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... remembered from a far longer date than the most intimate of her friends suspected; this form of clay had held the evil spirit which blasted her sweet youth, and compelled her, as it were, to stain her womanhood with crime. But, whether it were the majesty of death, or something originally noble and lofty in the character of the dead, which the soul had stamped upon the features, as it left them; so it was that Miriam now quailed and shook, not for the vulgar horror of the spectacle, ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... eating-house in which the railroad men snatched their meals as they went through, the widow opened a book and newsstand. Her home was on the floor above the stand, and it was there she brought her little girls to womanhood. Good-looking, harum-scarum Dave Cable saw Frances Coleman one evening as he dropped in to purchase a newspaper. It was at the end of June, in 1876, and the country was in the throes of excitement over the first news of the Custer massacre on the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... Fitzgerald first saw her, had hardly attained that incipient stage of womanhood which justifies a mother in taking her out into the gaieties of the world. She was then only sixteen; and had not in her manner and appearance so much of the woman as is the case with many girls of that age. She was shy and diffident ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... murder in your defence. I would have stormed Hell's ramparts and put the baleful city to the sword in the same cause. From that accursed day on which I first saw you until now I have held you high before my face as the glory of womanhood. And now you repeat the slander for which that monster lay at my mercy. You repeat it—you allowed him to say it ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... confronts a great task. On the one hand are the children, ignorant, immature, and undeveloped. In them lie ready to be called forth all the powers and capacities that will characterize their fully ripened manhood and womanhood. Given the right stimulus and direction, these powers will grow into splendid strength and capacity; lacking this stimulus and guidance, the powers ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... Maitland and I quietly stepped out into the corridor. The sight that met our gaze was one for which we had not been at all prepared. There at the window stood a beautiful young girl just on the verge of womanhood. Her frank blue eyes met mine with the utmost candour as I passed by her so that she should be between Maitland and me, and thus unable to elude us, whichever way she turned upon leaving the window. We had previously ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... boys had grown to be men. They no longer had any sympathy with the fruitless search. They made homes for themselves in the now farther remote frontier. And the girls had grown to womanhood and married. Old, and poor, and alone,—for his wife had died, and long ago ceased her plaintive evening call for her long-lost little Lucy,—Mr. Keyes petitioned the "Great and General Court" for the grant of a tract of public ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... brought up in the industrial and moral degradation of low city life, without a chance of learning how to use hands or head, and to acquire habits of steady industry, become an efficient workman? The conditions under which they grow up to manhood and womanhood preclude the possibility of efficiency. It is the bitterest portion of the lot of the poor that they are deprived of the opportunity of learning to work well. To taunt them with their incapacity, and ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... foundations of the Puritan establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother's enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester's charge the germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties. Everything was against her. The world was hostile. The child's own nature had something wrong in it, which continually betokened that she had been born amiss,—the effluence of her mother's ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... earnest, so naive, so emotionally stirred by the picture evoked that she enacted in pretty gestures the allegory of womanhood trampling upon sentimental emotion and turning toward Science with ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... they made her that which I esteem most excellent; and she taught me to regard women in a very different light to that in which I had formerly held them. Her only child she brought up in the same faith; and when that child—your mother—grew to womanhood, she was married to your father, according to the rites of your religion, by an English minister, who ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... herself forever from the man who, not suddenly, but by a system of gradual evolution—from the crude emotions of her girlhood through the growing consciousness of later years—had now manifested himself to her as all her heart could desire, all her spirit could crave, all her mature womanhood could need. She realized that he had long been this to her, but with a thick veil between herself and him which had hid the truth from her. The reading of the letter given her by Mr. Cortlin had torn that veil apart, ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... load too heavy for them to bear; every plunge they take forward lands them deeper; some have ceased even to struggle, and lie prone in the filthy bog, slowly suffocating, with their manhood and womanhood all but perished. It is no use standing on the firm bank of the quaking morass and anathematising these poor wretches; if you are to do them any good, you must give them another chance to get on their feet, you must give them firm foothold upon which they can once more stand upright, and ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... tarried, Your hopes have all miscarried, And even your fears are buried, Since fear with hope must die. You halted not, but hasted, And flew past, childhood wasted, And girlhood scarcely tasted, Now womanhood is nigh. ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... common. Poor Cynthia! Long before John became a general or had his revenge on the Baltimore girl, she married a farmer and was the mother of children, red-headed; and when John saw her years after, she looked tired and discouraged, as one who has carried into womanhood none of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Maude,' he thought, for he knew she would be beautiful, with her black hair, and starry eyes, and brilliant complexion, and he loved her with all the strength of his nature. To see her grow into womanhood, admired and sought after by everyone, was the desire of his heart, and as he believed that money was necessary to the perfect fulfilment of his desire, for her sake he would carry his secret to ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... Lady Anne he felt the steady friendly regard of a lad for a girl older than himself; towards the Lady Alice, now budding into ripe young womanhood, there lay deep in his heart the resolve to be some day her true knight in earnest as he had been her knight in pretence in that time of boyhood when he had so perilously climbed ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... throbbed for the sorrows of others was to thrill now on its own account. It was something mysterious which had happened to her, something against which she was later on to fight passionately, which was creeping like poison through her veins. With her splendid womanhood, her intense consciousness of life, how was it possible ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and kind intent The weary stranger oft hath known When she, its mistress, fair and good, Reigned here in peerless womanhood, When soft, shy maiden fancy gave Encouragement to soldiers brave, And Washington his presence lent To ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... her— Will clear away the parasitic forms That seem to keep her up but drag her down— Will leave her space to burgeon out of all Within her—let her make herself her own To give or keep, to live and learn and be All that not harms distinctive womanhood." ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... though women, as I see them, have little or no feeling of responsibility towards a county or a country or a career—although they may be entirely lacking in any kind of communal solidarity—they have an immense and automatically working instinct that attaches them to the interest of womanhood. It is, of course, possible for any woman to cut out and to carry off any other woman's husband or lover. But I rather think that a woman will only do this if she has reason to believe that the other woman has given her ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... in her father's house, her natural virtues grew too: beauty, charm, and modesty. And thus she became a young woman. Now in her young womanhood she was asked in marriage not only by great merchants, but even by kings. But she was prudent and did not like men. She would not have loved a god if he had been her husband. She was ready to die at ...
— Twenty-two Goblins • Unknown
... time, a long skirt, and this sudden maturing of her figure struck him, as a man, much more forcibly than it would probably have impressed a woman, more familiar with details. He had not noticed certain indications of womanhood, as significant, perhaps, in her carriage as her outlines, which had been lately perfectly apparent to her mother and Mary, but which were to him now, for the first time, indicated by a few inches of skirt. She not only looked taller to his masculine eyes, but these few inches had ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... years rolled on, and she grew to beautiful young womanhood, and more than one pair of eyes looked toward her as the one they would like to woo and win, or, as they thought of it, be able by abundant or valuable gifts to purchase her from her uncle. Up to this time, however, he had repelled most decidedly all advances made to him for her, ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... Piper had passed that period of life popularly known on the Monk Road as the matrimonial age. She had reached that second stage of unwed womanhood when interest in material things supersedes that of sentiment. She no longer sighed as she gazed down the stretch of walk, lined with rose hedge, that led from the verandah of her Cousin James' home to the Monk Road gateway, for there ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... art? His granddaughter, whom he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no provision for her education, although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's—she ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... wondering whether merely being lost in the woods is enough to have terrified a girl like that? Because, apparently, she is as superb a specimen of healthy womanhood as this world manufactures once in a hundred years. How well ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... paleness, the lips parted with a wistful smile, and a knot of bright-hued leaves upon her bosom made a mingling of snow and fire in the dress, whose white folds swept the grass. Against a background of hoary cliffs and somber pines, this figure stood out like a picture of blooming womanhood, but Manuel saw three blemishes upon it—Gilbert had sketched her with that shadowy veil upon her head, Gilbert had swung himself across a precipice to reach the scarlet nosegay for her breast, Gilbert stood beside her with her hand upon his arm; ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... Fantastically wrong! Some of it is not that; and, for the rest, is a woman like a toy balloon?—just a surface? To hear that proverb from a man is to know him at once for a phonographic kind of fool. The fundamental and enduring grace of womanhood goes down to the skeleton; you cannot have a pretty face without a pretty skull, just as you cannot have one ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... characteristics; but I think the most singular thing about him is his staggering lack of shame. Neither the hour of death nor the day of reckoning, neither the tent of exile nor the house of mourning, neither chivalry nor patriotism, neither womanhood nor widowhood, is safe at this supreme moment from his dirty little expedient of dieting the slave. As similar bullies, when they collect the slum rents, put a foot in the open door, these are always ready to push in a muddy wedge wherever there is a slit in a sundered ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... edge of Bander Maharani, just where the almost endless miles of betel-nut palms shut from view the yellow turrets of the palace, stood the palm-thatched bungalow in which Anak grew, in a few short years, from childhood to womanhood. The hot, sandy soil all about was covered with the flaxen burs of the betel, and the little sunlight that found its way down through the green and yellow fronds drew rambling checks on the steaming earth, that reminded Anak of the plaid on the silken sarong ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... thought before hearing Mrs. Miller read "The Greatest Battle that Ever was Fought" that I had caught all the subtle meanings of it, but after her reading that great tribute to womanhood I knew that I had never dreamed the ...
— Giant Hours With Poet Preachers • William L. Stidger
... little we know of Benjamin's childhood is contained in his "Autobiography", which the world has accepted as one of its best books and which was the first American book to be so accepted. In the crowded household, where thirteen children grew to manhood and womanhood, there were no luxuries. Benjamin's period of formal schooling was less than two years, though he could never remember the time when he could not read, and at the age of ten he was put to work ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... one of the greatest conceptions in all poetry. It has stood for centuries as the emblem of pure and priceless womanhood, with its petals of snowy white and its heart of gold. Mr. Chesterton once made a discovery that sent ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... midst of this tumult, surrounded by this coarse, unthinking life, my Grandmother Garland's home stood, a serene small sanctuary of lofty womanhood, a temple of New England virtue. From her and from my great aunt Bridges who lived in St. Louis, I received my first literary instruction, a partial offset to the vulgar yet heroic influence of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... because she knew that her husband was immediately behind her with the American. There had been within her at that moment something of a broad, comprehensive feeling, mingled with the more limited personal feeling of anger against another woman's successful impertinence, a sentiment of revolt in which womanhood seemed to rise up against the selfish tyrannies of men. As she had walked in the crowd, and heard for an instant Miss Schley's drawlling voice speaking to her husband, she had felt as if the forbidding of the acquaintance between herself and Rupert Carey had ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... afraid most college professors' wives should give up the old-fashioned expensive pose of ladyhood and join the new womanhood! ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... class of students and a new enrolment of citizens. Every year many thousands of young people pass from the Grammar to the High School grade of our public schools. Other thousands are growing up into manhood and womanhood. These are of a different constituency from their fathers and grandfathers who remember the civil war and were ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... were growing fast, giving promise of fair, graceful womanhood, Isadore particularly of great beauty; which her mother fondly hoped would be the means of securing her a wealthy husband; for Mrs. Conly's affections were wholly set upon the things of this life; by her and ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... looked and looked, and wondered, and at last longed: longed to comfort, to cherish, to draw to himself and shelter the budding womanhood before him, so fragile now, so full of promise for the future. And quick as the flame had sprung up under her breath, a magic flame awoke in his heart, and burned high and hot. If he ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... hale, hearty colored motherhood was laid the foundation of future health and strength for many a white baby, when otherwise its mother would have had to see it die. Frail, delicate mothers, who because of slavery had not done sufficient work to develop physical womanhood, were not able to nurse their own infants and gave them to the care of vigorous, healthy colored mothers, who took them to their bosoms and nursed them into strength. But for that supplemental supply of vigor, but for that sympathetic partnership in motherhood, much of the most potent ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... lose the wild, untamed elf who had so suddenly blossomed into a young lady before he could in any measure atone for the unhappy years of her loveless childhood. He would have kept her a little girl all her life, had he been able; but here she was springing up into the beauty of a glorious womanhood before his very eyes. So he sighed as he thought of his lost opportunities, then abruptly asked, "How old are ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... was that Dic often went to see Tom, but talked to Tom's sister. Many an evening, long after Tom had unceremoniously climbed the rude stairway to bed, would the brown-eyed maid, with her quaint, wistful touch of womanhood, sit beside Dic on the ciphering log inside the fireplace, listening to him read from one of Billy Little's books, watching him trace continents, rivers, and mountains on a map, or helping him to cipher a ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... Saints,' from which he had himself exiled all copperheads and venomous reptiles, blessed with good and true Priests of the old Religion, with the sweet face of the Blessed Virgin Mary to smile down upon them in their chapels, teaching them reverence for womanhood, and feeding as they firmly believe upon the glorified Body which is hourly broken to exalt and purify humanity, fell in fierce assault upon us. Men from the land of Burke, Curran, Emmet, Moore, Meagher, rose to pillage, burn, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... always the last to see the turn that his affairs are taking. A woman's name may be in the mouths of scores of people before the party most concerned wakes up to a sense of his position and is faced by a picture of helpless and lost womanhood. If the man falls into the alcoholic death-trap, we have once more a spectacle of dull misery which may be indicated but which cannot be accurately described. The victim grows hateful—his symptoms have been scientifically described by one of the finest ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... life more lovely than the transition of a young girl from childhood into womanhood. It suggests the springtime of the year, when the leaf buds are partly opened and the tender blossoms wave in the genial sunshine; when the colors so airy and delicate are set and the ethereal odors are wafted gently to the senses; when earth and air are ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... (he thought to himself) by this noble girl, who walks the earth fresh and strong as a Greek goddess, pure as Diana, stately as Juno? She belongs to the unspoiled womanhood of another age, and is wasted among these dolls ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... conviction that self-pity was reasonable, normal, wholesome, a belief that it was her duty to publicly display intensive evidences of her affliction, determined a lasting and potent influence in this girl's life which was to alloy her young womanhood—disturbing factors, all, which before twelve caused much emotional disequilibrium. She now lived with her uncle in New York City and her summers were spent in Canada. The sense of fitness was so strong that during the next two vitally important, developing years she avoided ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... old castle in the wood, His daughters, in the dawn of womanhood, Returning from their convent school, had made Resplendent with their bloom the forest shade, Reminding him of their dead mother's face, When first she came into that gloomy place,— A memory in his heart as dim and sweet As moonlight ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... just completed, and doing well in his studies, but keenly regretting that the war was ended without his participation. The white-haired soldier also found his daughter, Edith, now fifteen years of age, budding into a beautiful womanhood, and bearing so strong a resemblance to her mother that he gazed at her with mixed emotions ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... do it now!" laughed Alice, with a downward glance at her plump figure. Yet she was not over-plump, but with the rounding curves and graces of coming womanhood. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls - First Appearances in Photo Dramas • Laura Lee Hope
... the mad pursuit, which terminated by casting him insensible at Ronald's door, and brought to his succor one who not only watched beside him with all the devotion of a brother, mingled with the tenderness of womanhood itself, but whose buoyant, healthy tone of mind had infused new hope and vigor into a broken, despondent, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... womanhood, a young girl who might chance to pass by, disturbed him, causing him profound emotion. This was often even altogether apart from the individual: the image, merely, of youth, the perfume and the dazzling freshness which emanated from it, bright eyes, healthy ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... along—as it grew to a companionable age—with the wisdom of a mind ripened by wide acquaintance with men and with public affairs. Mrs. St. Quentin—famous in Dublin, London, Paris, as a beauty and a wit—had passed her early womanhood amid the tumult of great events. She had witnessed the horrors of the Terror, the splendid amazements of the First Empire; and could still count among her friends and correspondents, politicians and literary men of no mean standing. A legend obtains that Lord Byron ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... 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 ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... manhood up! Let it blaze its best in your flashing eyes! Can it stare my womanhood down, or hope To scorch my pride till it droops and dies?— There, do not be angry;—take my hand; Forgive me;—I meant not anything: I am foolish, and cannot understand Why you throw life out for one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... beauty. Having spent a decade in acquiring a disgust for a certain type of woman, he was inclined to over-estimate his surprising good fortune, and was content in the hope that time was on his side. Like a flower unfolding to the sun, the treasures of her womanhood would be all his one day, drawn forth by the warmth ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... writings upon American women cannot be overestimated. They act as invigorating tonics, courses of beefsteak and iron upon the somewhat too fragile loveliness, the exacting and fastidious fine-ladyism, the morbid helplessness, far too prevalent among them. Their ideal of womanhood has been wrong, narrow and contracted, wanting in strength, breadth, and charity. Miss Muloch and Gail Hamilton, while cherishing the sanctity of womanhood, are giving broader views, higher aims, truer delicacy, and greater self-reliance to their plastic sex. Their lessons and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... girl, was Frances Cameron, with a great mass of blue-black hair and flashing black eyes. She was thin, strong, and lacking in those soft curves of budding womanhood which girls of her age usually display. "Straight up and down, my dears," she often said. "Built upon the most approved clothespin plan, with every bone perfectly—not ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... and womanhood of his humankind, with all the crimes of violence they had ever done. Skag met it wistfully at first, with knowledges of loving-kindness; then a rising force that almost choked him, of ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... wild-flowers still spared to the withered fields, and then a sudden distrust of her small ankles seized her, and she inspected them narrowly for those burrs and bugs and snakes which are supposed to lie in wait for helpless womanhood. Then she plucked some golden heads of wild oats, and with a sudden inspiration placed them in her black hair, and then came quite unconsciously upon the trail leading to ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... his face,—his eyes Awful with splendor, and his august head With blinding brilliance crowned by vivid flame. Then in a voice that charmed the listening air: "Woman, arise! I have no influence On Death, who is the servant of the Fates. Howbeit for thy passion and thy prayer, The grace of thy fair womanhood and youth, Thus godlike will I intercede for thee, And sue the insatiate sisters for this life. Yet hope not blindly: loth are these to change Their purpose; neither will they freely give, But haggling ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... told how he felt about Lydia, or whether he had any feeling at all, save a proper gratitude for her tenderness to his father. But he had found her in his path, when his hurt soul was crying out to all fostering womanhood to save him from the ravening claw of woman's cruelty. She had felt his need, and they had looked at each other with eyes that pierced defences. And then, incarnate sympathy, tender youth, she had rested in his arms, and in the generosity of her giving and the exquisiteness ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... voice aroused all her outraged womanhood, and springing to her feet again, she turned upon him with all the courage ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the advantage of a man possessing a "little knowledge"—falsely styled "a dangerous thing"—over a man who possesses no knowledge. Now, also, was exhibited the power and courage that are latent in true womanhood. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... high poop deck, under an awning spread over it to shelter them from the burning rays of the sun, were collected the aristocratical portion of the community. There were there to be found ladies and gentlemen, the sedate matron, and the blooming girl just reaching womanhood, the young wife and the joyous child; there were lawyers and soldiers, sailors and merchants, clergymen and doctors, some of them holding high rank in their respective professions. The captain, of course, was king, ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... pale faces profaned this island home of the Genii, a young Ojibwa girl, just maturing into womanhood, often wandered there, and gazed from its dizzy heights and witnessed the receding canoes of the large war parties of the combined bands of the Ojibwas and Ottawas speeding south, seeking for fame ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... dark-browed and dark-eyed Egyptian maiden had grown into womanhood, and the freshness of youth, the joyousness of health and early life were her's, while her mistress was passing into age. Sarah no longer hoped to become a mother, and, believing that the promise was not intended for her, she urged Abraham to take another wife, offering for his acceptance her ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... remembering the wreckage of womanhood he had encountered on the sunken ways of life. She was no fairy. She was flesh and blood, and the possibilities of wreckage were in her as they had been in him even when he lay at his mother's breast. And there was in ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... descent upon any one person more than upon another can be attributed to destiny alone. Nor, in accepting her high position, had she been guilty of breach of faith, for she had long awaited the return of her lover, and he had not come. And through all those years, as she had grown into more mature womanhood, she had vaguely felt that those stolen interviews had been but the unreasoning suggestions of girlish romance, too carelessly indifferent to the exigencies of poverty and diverse nationality; and that, if he had ever returned to claim ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... his arms. She had grown into a tall girl of nearly fifteen, budding into womanhood and beauty; promising perfection, although not yet attained to it. William Aveleyn was also nearly half a foot taller; and a blush which suffused his handsome face at being surprised alone with Amber, intimated that the feelings of a man ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was at once confident and gracious,—clearly the speaker took it for granted that she would receive attention, and she implied her thanks abundantly beforehand. It was a voice that evoked in the imagination a charming picture of fresh, young, confident, and gracious womanhood. ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... pound a day. The Governor-General hoped from the encouraging tone of the letters that she was quietly housed, out in the borders of some primeval forest, gradually enlarging into the fullness of perfect womanhood. ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... shall be discovered, it will happen that the exclusion of suffrage will not be considered as a denial of a right, but as an exemption granted to women from cares and burdens which a tender and affectionate regard for womanhood ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... woman beautiful; condemned his imagination that it had lacked the wit to conceive a like combination. Her eyes, commonly full of laughter, he had seen darken with anger and melt with tenderness. There were moments when she looked so strong as momentarily to isolate herself from normal womanhood, and suggest unlimited if unsuspected powers of good or evil; but those were fleeting impressions; as a rule she looked the most completely human woman he ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... characterized this grand deed of unselfish devotion as the most heroic incident in our naval history. Mrs. Arthur was a lady of the highest culture, and in the varied relations of life—wife, mother, friend—she illustrated all that gives to womanhood its highest charm, and commands for it the purest homage. She died in 1880, after an illness of but three days, leaving a son and a daughter, with a large number of mourning friends, not only in society, of which she was an ornament, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... had been formed some little time before Mwres threw Elizabeth's budding womanhood in his way. It was one of Bindon's most cherished secrets that he had a considerable capacity for a pure and simple life of a grossly sentimental type. The thought imparted a sort of pathetic seriousness to the offensive and quite inconsequent ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... Isaura was one of those women for whom, even in natures the least chivalric, love, however ardent, cannot fail to be accompanied with a certain reverence,—the reverence with which the ancient knighthood, in its love for women, honoured the ideal purity of womanhood itself. Till then Rameau ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... emptied down into the drain. America is ruled by her cities, and they are ruled by the saloon and unrighteous trusts and political bosses. Foreigners from the old world slums flaunt the banner of independence in the face of American womanhood. And the church of God that might remedy the evils ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... Evangelist, into closer communion with Christ, not to draw attention to Christ's mother. Yet out of those slight, and perhaps almost contemptuous indications, the Middle Ages have made three or four perfect and wonderful types of glorified womanhood: the Mother in adoration, the crowned, enthroned Virgin, the Mater Gloriosa; the broken-hearted Mother, Mater Dolorosa, as found at the foot of the cross or fainting at the deposition therefrom; types more complete and more immortal than ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... away from an unholy world. As a man shelters a little, flickering flame, hollowing his hands around it to keep it from the wind, as a man screens a flower from the cold, so I have striven to shelter and to screen your life, so that you might come to womanhood in such a fashion—so simple, so pure, so holy—as that in which girls grew to womanhood in the Golden Age. Therefore I did not tell you that Robert the Good was dead; therefore I did not tell you that this Italianate ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Lawrence stood still. Over the howling wind and smashing sea, he heard thin voices shouting orders. Another mass of water swept over the deck. Near him a woman screamed piteously. Instinctively, the masculine desire to protect womanhood made him ache to help her, but he bit his lip and clung to the rail. If he could only see! Never before in his five years of blindness had he felt the full horror of it. He had taught himself to forget his loss of sight. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... Lord K——, the hero of my teens to whom I had never spoken, and partly because he was the exact opposite of Uncle Tom. How Miss Collett could! How anybody could! Yet Uncle Tom always talked as if he had only to choose among the flower of English womanhood, and the stouter and more repellent he grew the more communicative and conscientious he became about his fear of raising expectations in female bosoms which he might not be able to gratify. How I scorned Uncle Tom when he talked like that, knowing as ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... against, I will not say the restraints, but even the convenances of civilised life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it were blasphemy to think of in the same day with noble womanhood as we all have known it—if that, I say, is the type of the young mondaine of the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which they are subjected. ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... of Womanhood. No other gospel gives her anything like so large a place as Luke. Indeed, all of the first three chapters or a greater part of their contents may have been given him, as he "traced out accurately from the first" (1:3), by Mary and Elizabeth. ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... first four alphabets (there are five in all) comes the date, "September 19, 1823," and in the lower corner another date, "October 24," when the square was completed, with the name of the child who wrought it, long since grown to womanhood, and now nearly forty years dead, but there recorded, in pink silk cross stitch, as "aged ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... eddies of the present-day world currents is what has been loosely called the "Woman Movement." The sensitive and vicarious spirit of womanhood has been enlisted for service in behalf of those who have been denied a fair chance, or who are the victims of oppression, ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... possessed, would have understood the major's conduct, and have found consolation in the major's submission. Mrs. Milroy found consolation in nothing. Neither nature nor training helped her to meet resignedly the cruel calamity which had struck at her in the bloom of womanhood and the prime of beauty. The curse of incurable sickness blighted her at ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... asserted itself, then she had to fight like a tigress for the ownership and possession of her own person; and, ofttimes, had to suffer pains and lacerations for her virtuous self-assertion. When she reached maturity all the tender instincts of her womanhood were ruthlessly violated. At the age of marriage—always prematurely anticipated under slavery—she was mated, as the stock of the plantation were mated, not to be the companion of a loved and chosen husband, but ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... picture.' Over each door shall hang one of the lithographed angel-heads of the San Sisto, to watch our going-out and coming-in; and the glorious Mother and Child shall hang opposite the Venus di Milo, to show how Greek and Christian unite in giving the noblest type to womanhood. And then, when we have all our sketches and lithographs framed and hung here and there, and your flowers blooming as they always do, and your ivies wandering and rambling as they used to, and hanging in the most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various |
