"Maternity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... protective functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way—neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acute thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On his own ground he is even very fresh and healthy: his delineation of youthful maternity, for example, is as true as it is beautiful; and his sympathy with the gleefulness of children is devoid of affectation. We have then only to ask ourselves whether the defect in him of all thought and feeling which is not at once capable of graceful fleshly incarnation, be sufficient to lower ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young. Now, where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment arising, and it will grow, against connubial jealousy, against fierce maternity, against passion of all sorts; unnecessary things now, and things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a refined and ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... without any pretext of justification. What would become of us if such a precedent could be extended to the genus Mammalia? Hundreds of rapacious old maids would be seizing all sorts and all sizes of babies from agonized mothers, and asserting for themselves the hallowed duties of maternity. Our infant days would have been days of ceaseless motion. We should have been shuttle-cocked from maiden to mother and from mother to maiden after a fashion calculated to defeat the wise purposes of ipecac and paregoric, and to frighten our natural curls ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various
... the short, recently cut stubble. Again Em'ly set off instantly like a deer. She left the dismayed bantams behind her. She crossed the ditch with one jump of her stout blue legs, flew over the grass, and was at once among the turkeys, where, with an instinct of maternity as undiscriminating as it was reckless, she attempted to huddle some of them away. But this other mamma was not a bantam, and in a few moments Em'ly was entirely routed in her attempt to acquire a new ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... There was enough of maternity about her to have enabled her to undertake the duty for a dozen sons' wives,—if the wives were women with whom she could feel sympathy. And she could feel sympathy very easily; and was a woman not at all prone to inquire too curiously as to the merits of a son's wife. But ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... that one fine evening, just at sunset, she lay weak as water, but safe; with a little face by her side, and the heaven of maternity opening on her. ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a close, at least as far as I witnessed it. The alcalde came upon the ground; and the girl was given in charge to the policia, until the true mother should bring forward more definite proofs of maternity. I never heard the finale ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... the savages also. The spirit of the man became embittered, and the mean traits of his nature asserted themselves, and wreaked their malice, as is customary with mean natures, on the nearest or most inoffensive object. My poor mother! Maternity was marred for you by fear and pain and contempt; and whatever errors your child has fallen into, were an evil inheritance that only years of suffering and ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... him of her matronly love to a greater degree than she gave to the others. She had never lost the influence of her old-country up-bringing, and to Tony, her own and yet not her own, she was bound by more than the ties of maternity. ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... better with each day, but remained wistful-eyed. The ward no longer avoided her, though she was never one of them. One day the Probationer found a new baby in the children's ward; and, with the passion of maternity that is the real reason for every good woman's being, she cuddled the mite in her arms. She visited the nurses ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to desire what had befallen her, to think in terms of beauty; to feel the miracle of her state and the age-old throbs that make maternity sublime. The sense of her aversion debased while it immersed her. She reasoned how valiantly whole eternities of women had gone down to meet motherhood and how proudly those eternities of women had worn the moment. Her mother. Mrs. Kemble. The concept ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... comparable to that of the mother as she looks on her first-born; but the moment is dearly bought. Time advances, beauty passes; there come the years of neglect, of spleen, of weariness. 'Tis in pain that Nature disposes them for maternity; in pain and illness, dangerous and prolonged, she brings maternity to its close. What is a woman after that? Neglected by her husband, left by her children, a nullity in society, then piety becomes her one and last resource. In nearly every part of the world, the cruelty of the civil ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... with a chilling air, "I am very happy to have been the means of preserving a son to his mother, for they say that the sentiment of maternity is the most holy of all; and the good fortune which occurred to me, monsieur, might have enabled you to dispense with a duty which, in its discharge, confers an undoubtedly great honor; for I am aware that M. de Villefort is not usually lavish of the favor which he now ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... poor slave girl lay on the scanty straw of her dungeon, waiting—with what agony the great and pitying God of the white and black only knows—for the birth of the child of her adulterous master. Horrible! Was ever what George Sand justly terms 'the great martyrdom of maternity'—that fearful trial which love alone converts into joy unspeakable—endured under such conditions? What was her substitute for the kind voices and gentle soothings of affection? The harsh grating of her prison lock,—the mockings and taunts of ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... was not all. The clumsy, heavy Empress stepped upon her egg, and broke it in the second week of its existence; but, faithful to its memory, she refused to forego the duties of maternity, and would persist in staying on her nest. As the season advanced, Ben lost hope of the second brood he had counted upon. In short, his Empress had the legitimate "hen-fever," and it carried her off, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... many of its readers just where they have been themselves. There is trouble in it, and sorrow, and pain, and parting, but the sunset glorifies the clouds of the varied day, and the peace which passes understanding pervades all. For young women whose lives are just opening into wifehood and maternity, we have read nothing better for ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... both Salvationists and Volunteers have taken part in our midnight meetings. Many people passing our meetings suppose that we are from the Salvation Army, as it is believed to do such work. The Army has rescue and maternity homes and does much good work for the fallen, but the preaching in the vice districts is done by our ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various
... agriculture is almost wholly given over to male labour, and in several continental countries there is a growing tendency to spare women the kinds of labour which tax the muscular forces most severely. The growing consideration for the duties of maternity, operating through public opinion and legislation, favour this curtailment of woman's sphere of activity. Further, in all employments where physical strength is an important factor, the net productivity ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... only 47 percent were attended, loss of life due to isolation and lack of medical care is apparent. In sparsely settled regions the solution of this problem seems to demand the provision of local maternity hospitals, for the difficulty ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... accompanying his sex development, so the sister should be apprised of the physiological necessity of her periodical functions, and of nature's kindly care and development of her delicate and wonderful sex mechanism, the sole purpose of which is maternity. It will fortify her maidenliness to tell her that much of the world is deceitful and degrading in sex matters, and that if she would be a perfect woman, mentally and physically, she must vigilantly ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... the discoveries of the great Dutch savant Swammerdam. It is well, however, to add this detail, but little known: before Swammerdam a Flemish naturalist named Clutius had arrived at certain important truths, such as the sole maternity of the queen and her possession of the attributes of both sexes, but he had left these unproved. Swammerdam founded the true methods of scientific investigation; he invented the microscope, contrived injections to ward off decay, was the first ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... pluck their hearts out, fill her mouth with sorrel and young grass-shoots, and feel the cool saps of them upon her palate. And sometimes her Mother frightened her, for the dim clouds hid beneath the horizon of maternity were moving now and their color was dark. Nature had as many moods as Joan and often looked distant and terrible. Poor little blue-eyed "sister of the sun and moon!" She likened herself so bravely to the other children of her Mother—to the stars, to the fair ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... treatment; she was about to become a mother. But her ugliness and imbecility, and the habit they had of looking upon her as a victim devoted to the general amusement, rendered her persecutors implacable, notwithstanding their ordinary respect for maternity. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... up the letter, unfolded it, and read it to the end with bearing calm and firm. The first lines ran thus: "Vile Moujik. Thou hast made me a mother. Be happy and proud. Thou hast revealed to me that maternity can be a torture. In my ignorant simplicity, I did not know until now it could be aught else than an intoxication, a pride, a virtue, which God and the church regard with favor, and the angels shelter with their white wings. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... interrupted herself, as the man raised haggard eyes to watch her impersonally, "far better to face the facts, my dear! My son tells me, Miss Field the—the well-nigh incredible statement that—forgetting the honour of womanhood, and the tender claims of maternity—" ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... the war into the enemy's camp, la Pigoreau should impugn the maternity of the countess, claiming the child as her own; and that the ladies should depose that the countess's accouchement was an imposture invented to cause it to be supposed that she had given ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the rest, he concealed his depression, but it soon was past concealing; he only redoubled his care and watching as his wife grew the stronger of the two; and he faded slowly away and died. His wife had nothing to sustain her spirits except the approach of maternity—she would live for her child. When the child was born and baptized in the name of the Holy Church, though without the Church's full ceremonies, Marguerite felt the strength of motherhood; became a better huntress, a better provider. A new sorrow came; in the sixteenth ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... recruits are instructed by a pathologist in matters pertaining to pregnancy, abortion, and the identification of abortion instruments and drugs. They receive instruction in maternity hospitals, with special reference to the unmarried mother. Children's homes, orphanages, and also homes for the aged are visited and studied with a view to creating a solid ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie
... that what had come to pass, unless unchallenged, would imperil his presumptive title. First it was sought to throw doubt upon Bianca's actual maternity, and next to secure the person of the ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... the name of the late Dr. F. C. Batchelor it is proposed that the name of the Forth Street Maternity Hospital (Dunedin) be altered to that of the Batchelor Hospital."—Southland ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various
... range. When possible, the coming calf crop should be born where the mothers are to be located, as it strengthens the ties between an animal and its range by making sacred the birthplace of its young. From instinctive warnings of maternity, cows will frequently return to the same retreat annually to ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... that he was German to the core when Mr. and Mrs. Bingle went there to pick out a healthy Teuton to add to their collection. They were positive that they wanted a German baby; nothing else would do, they announced clearly and positively to the superintendent in charge of the maternity ward. The superintendent was most gracious about it. She said they could return little Fritz if he didn't come up to the mark in every particular. What more could a German fancier desire than a child whose name alone stood for all that one could possibly seek in Teutonic ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... The pouring of the water into the cloth, often accompanied by telling the beads on a rosary, is a prayer. The whole is called "The Flowing Invocation." I have seldom seen anything more plaintively affecting, for it denotes that a mother in the first joy of maternity has passed away to suffer (according to popular belief) in the Lake of Blood, one of the Buddhist hells, for a sin committed in a former state of being, and it appeals to every passer-by to shorten the penalties of a woman in anguish, for in that lake she must remain until ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... attainment, must scrap many an institution, many a habit, and set up the reverse of many a rule of conduct. We have indeed reached a new era, one which is not that of taming animals, when young women can—and know that they can—as war-brides strike against the labor of maternity and against the foreseen horror of a fate for one's offspring such as they would never choose for the fruit ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... running into a side street, the next one toward which I was approaching. I followed the crowd. My uniform got me past the gendarmes in through a little court, up a pair of stairs where the shell had penetrated the walls of a maternity hospital. ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... be tamed by such persistent sweetness," said Mr. Birkett to his wife, while she, with a kindly half-checked sigh, true to her central quality of maternity and love of peace all round, breathed "Poor little ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... mighty. That is the America which the Fathers conceived, and it is that to which the children look forward,—an America which shall displace Ireland and Germany, Massachusetts and Carolina, in the hearts of those who call them mother, with an image of maternity at once more tender ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... out a cavity of about four feet in the middle of the heap, and here deposit the eggs, which are afterwards covered up, to be hatched by the combined effects of fermentation and the sun. But the bird does not thus escape any of the cares of maternity, for the male watches the eggs carefully, being endowed with a wonderful instinct which tells him the temperature suitable for them. Sometimes he covers them thickly with leaves, and sometimes lays them nearly bare, repeating ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... can't be allowed!" said Catharine, with energy. And, as she spoke, she seemed to feel again the soft bloom of Hester's young cheek against her own, just as when she had drawn the girl to her, in that instinctive caress. The deep maternity in Catharine had never yet found scope enough in the ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... answers her mother. The girl is one of those rare, feminine creatures whose soul and body are framed for maternity. In one swift rush of realization and of premonition, she comprehends all that the doom upon her race must eventually mean to her; she utters the cry of Africa's heart in America. "It would be more merciful to strangle the little things at birth.... This white Christian ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... Caroline Rest start their educational work before the baby is sick, in fact, before it is born. Their results have been so notable that several well-to-do mothers declare that they wish they too might have a school. Dispensaries and diet kitchens and more particularly maternity wards of hospitals, family physicians, nurses, and midwives, should be required to know how to teach mothers to feed babies regularly, the right quantities, under conditions that insure cleanliness whether the breast or the bottle is used. Perhaps some day no girl will be given a graduating certificate, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... one of the privileges of wealth to lighten the cares and duties of maternity, and the enlarged household was arranged upon a basis that did not interfere with the life of fashion and the charitable engagements of the mother. Indeed, this adaptable woman soon found that she had become an object ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Regeneration Humaine," founded by Monsieur Paul Robin, in its organ L'Emancipateur issued not only instructions on "the means how to avoid large families," but also pamphlets on "free love and free maternity."[758] The campaign of race-suicide was thus combined with the undermining of morality; legal families were to be limited and illegal births encouraged. This was quite in accord with the doctrines of the ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves Toward the house of maternity, the land of migrations look afar, Look off the shores of my western sea, The ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... vague hope that some day he might utilize it for this very purpose, and here he spent with her three wonderfully happy years. Here his son Bryce was born, and here, two days later, the new-made mother made the supreme sacrifice of maternity. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... I could," retorted Alvina. "I want to be a maternity nurse—" She looked strangely, even outrageously, at her governess. "I want to be a maternity nurse. Then I shouldn't have to attend operations." And ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... imprisonment itself meant no more than reasonable confinement and employment on Government works. There were no mediaeval horrors here; and the act of worship demanded was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in the church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life, Sustenance and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter. Sunday worship was ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... In Bradford, a prosperous English town which pays particular attention to its mothers and children, the infant mortality in 1917 was 132 per 1,000 and the birth-rate 13.2. In Connaught, where there are no maternity centres or other aids to survival, but on the contrary a great dearth of the means of well-being, the infant mortality was only 50, whilst the birth-rate was actually 45! [28] So untrue is it to say that a high death-rate is due ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... toe-joints, the heel; All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one's body, male or female, The lung-sponges, the stomach-sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-frame, Sympathies, heart-valves, palate-valves, sexuality, maternity, Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings, The voice, articulation, language, whispering, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... off danger, to ensure the life hereafter, to bring luck of any sort. Now, as the giver of birth, the cowry-shell also came to be identified with, or regarded as, the mother and creator of the human family; and in course of time, as this belief became rationalized, the shell's maternity received visible expression and it became personified as an actual woman, the Great Mother, at first nameless and with ill-defined features. But at a later period, when the dead king Osiris gradually acquired ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... her. The child held out his little arms, and kicked and crowed to be taken, and when his mother had intrusted him to Evadne, he clasped her tight round the neck, and nibbled her cheek with his warm, moist mouth, sending a delicious thrill through every fibre of her body, a first foretaste of maternity. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... one chance in one hundred that his presence should be necessary. He had sent a safe remedy, telephoned a severe but soothing message, and mentally prayed now for patience to meet the irrational, angered eyes of maternity, and to administer a reproof equally gentle and deterrent—gentle, for of course the woman's nerves had to be allowed for; she had been nursing this boy for months. The Doctor slipped into his long, fur-trimmed overcoat and ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... The splendid Grace Maternity Hospital was another centre of Army work which delighted the English visitor. Over the border into the United States went Kate Lee, and in Chicago saw The Army at work in the self- ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... disabilities from which he is happily exempt (as if a disability could come into any life but through the door of an ability); and her larger measure of the divine attributes, faith, hope, and love—love, as compassion and as maternity—are seen as simple weaknesses to which he ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the cares of maternity, she seems like some young goddess fresh from the hand of Jupiter. All nerve, electricity, and motion—her thoughts sparkling and full of flavor, and light, and life, this new-born Eve of the celestial kingdom inspires the down-trodden Eve of earth, ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... intimated his belief that monogamy, with its exclusive life, is a diluted form of monasticism. And his opinion seems to be that, in order to produce the noblest race possible, we must have a free society, with a State that reverences and respects maternity and pensions any mother who personally ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... and gloriously well through the whole of those mysterious first months of maternity which are to so many women exhausting and painful. Every nerve of her body seemed strung and attuned to normal and perfect harmony. She was more beautiful than ever, stronger than ever, and so glad that she smiled perpetually without knowing it. For the first time since the old ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from them on its way home; their life will wax and wane; and if they would be wise, they must wake and rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that commands all things—a sun's revolutions and the rhythmic pangs of maternity. ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... who has handled many maternity cases can call to mind instances where every condition was present to perfection, for the production of maternal impression, on the time-honored lines. None occurred. Most mothers can, if they give the matter careful consideration, duplicate this experience from their ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... smile. Undershaw, impassive, was playing with his watch-chain. Lydia radiant and erect, in a dress of gray-blue tweed, a veil of the same tint falling back from the harmonious fairness of her face, had her eyes on Felicia. There was a melting kindness in the eyes—as though the maternity deep ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... almost before we have deemed her emancipated from calfhood herself we find her in the capacity of a mother. With the cares of maternity other demands are quickly made upon her. She is obliged to ostracize herself from society, and enter into the prosaic details of producing small, pallid globules of butter, the very pallor of which so thoroughly belies ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... affability of a gentlewoman and the obligation of her position. To this was added the slight languor of the cultivated American wife, whose health has been affected by the birth of her first child, and whose views of marriage and maternity were slightly tinged with gentle scepticism. She was sincerely attached to her husband, "who dominated the household" like the rest of his "women folk," with the faint consciousness of that division of service which renders the position of the sultan of a ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... the woman I can't say, but about a twelvemonth after, Mrs. Ginx, with the assistance of two doctors hastily fetched from the hospital by her frightened husband, nearly perished in a fresh effort of maternity. This time two sons and two daughters fell to the lot of the happy pair. Her Majesty sent four pounds. But whatever peace there was at home, broils disturbed the street. The neighbors, who had sent for the police ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... his wish Mrs. Gaunt glided to other matters, and was naturally led to speak of the prospects of their Church, and the possibility of reconverting these islands. This had been the dream of her young heart; but marriage and maternity, and the universal coldness with which the subject had been received, had chilled her so, that of late years she had almost ceased to speak of it. Even Leonard, on a former occasion, had listened coldly to her; but now his heart was open to her. He was, in fact, quite as enthusiastic on this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... from its blue placidity; her only sense of love the unspoken yearning within, when the soft, tumultuous stress of the west-wind kissed her, who should have been clasped in tender arms and caressed by loving lips; whose dumb, creative instincts, becoming genius instead of maternity, struggled outward from their home in heart and brain to culminate in this world's-wonder, and so build a monument namelessly splendid to the grand nature that found its bread of life was a stone and perished: or whether this creature were the fashioning ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... servants, whose evening is in. On the same principle, an actor when he has a holiday goes to another theatre; and no doubt it must be interesting for a cook to observe the differentiae, the finer shades of difference, in the conduct of a kitchen. When women are married and the cares of maternity set in, one does not see how they can get any holiday or recreation at all; but I believe a good deal is done for their amusement by the mothers' meetings and other clerical agencies. There is, however, below the shop girls, the dressmakers, ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... all miseries, the desire of an obvious impossibility—even with this she was happier than he; because she loved him and she saw him daily getting stronger; because their relative positions brought out the best and the least romantic part of a woman's love—the subtle maternity of it. There is a fine romance in carrying our lady's kerchief in an inner pocket, but there is something higher and greater and much more durable in the darning of a sock; for within the handkerchief there is chiefly gratified vanity, while ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the early age of twelve years, she had mastered those authors, and had laid out a course of life, not in accord with her good mother's ideas, for it excluded the idea of religion as commonly understood, and crushed out the sentiment of maternity, that crowning glory to which nearly all young female children aspire, although in them, at a tender age, it is instinctive and not based upon knowledge of ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... fashions, he had unearthed the origin of the fashionable aigrette, the most desired of all the feathered possessions of womankind. He had been told of the cruel torture of the mother-heron, who produced the beautiful aigrette only in her period of maternity and who was cruelly slaughtered, usually left to die slowly rather than killed, leaving her whole nest of baby-birds to starve while they awaited the return ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... some woman of whom one feels by instinct that they were, as Miss Balquidder had once jokingly said of herself, specially meant to be mothers. And though, in its strange providence, Heaven often denies the maternity, it can not and does not mean to shut up the well-spring of that maternal passion—truly a passion to such women as these, almost as strong as the passion of love—but lets the stream, which might otherwise have blessed one ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... before them, "look, yon wretched mother, whose voice an instant ago uttered the coarsest accents of maudlin and intoxicated prostitution, is now fostering her infant, with a fondness stamped upon her worn cheek and hollow eye, which might shame the nice maternity of nobles; and there, too, yon wretch whom, in the reckless effrontery of hardened abandonment, we ourselves heard a few minutes since boast of his dexterity in theft, and openly exhibit its token,—look, he is now, with a Samaritan's own charity, giving the very ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sleep almost as her head touched the pillow. And in her sleep she lived again that night at the Strattons with Ned and heard Geisner profess God and condemn her hatred of maternity. "You close the gates of Life," he said. Taking her hand he led her to where a great gate stood, of iron, brass bound, and there behind it a great flood of little children pressed and struggled, dashing and crashing till the ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... and profound philosophical image was wholly misunderstood by Agur's orthodox adversary, who founds upon the deprecatory allusion to the womb a general accusation of lack of reverence for maternity and a specific charge of ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... see, I've just been appointed Commissioner of Maternity. I'm what you might call the official mother of the town. Since that great Statesman, the Hatter"—here the Duchess winked graciously at the March Hare—"devised his crowning achievement in the Municipal Control ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... They are not very noticeable. They seem held in reserve. They are just as tense and stiff as the men are slack and abandoned. Some strange will holds the women taut. They seem like weapons, dangerous. There is nothing charming nor winning about them; at the best a full, prolific maternity, at the worst a yellow poisonous bitterness of the flesh that is like a narcotic. But they are too strong for the men. The male spirit, which would subdue the immediate flesh to some conscious or social purpose, is overthrown. The woman in ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... of the majority of women for maternity and home-making must be taken into consideration. Some boys play with weapons, others with machinery, still others are interested in dogs and horses. Some boys are natural traders, others love to hunt and fish, while you will find an occasional lad curled up in a big chair in the ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... throughout the southern states that the first born of each slave maiden should be the son or daughter of her master and the girls were forced into maternity at puberty. The mothers naturally resisted this terrible practice and Harriott was determined to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... shelter for a few days until she could be used as a witness, was clutching a battered doll which she had kept with her during her six months of an "evil life." Two of these prematurely aged children came to us one day directly from the maternity ward of the Cook County hospital, each with a baby in her arms, asking for protection, because they did not want to go home for fear of "being licked." For them were no jewels nor idle living such as the storybooks portrayed. The first of the older women whom I knew came ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... against the doors, and shouting and crying. He brought Adelaide back to the world, as it were; she looked after him with the most adorable awkwardness; she who, in her youth, had neglected the duties of a mother, now felt the divine pleasures of maternity in washing his face, dressing him, and watching over his sickly life. It was a reawakening of love, a last soothing passion which heaven had granted to this woman who had been so ravaged by the want of some one to love; ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... legislature, united with the Boston University School of Medicine. In 1868 it had graduated seventy-two women, among whom were Dr. Lucy E. Sewall and Dr. Helen Morton (who afterwards went to Paris and studied obstetrics at Madame Aillot's Hospital of Maternity) and Dr. Mercy B. Jackson.[148] There are now 205 regular practitioners in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... fellow," I said, "you didn't tell us what sort of place this was; and Carpenter thought it must be a maternity-ward." ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... flesh, the median swell of bosoms of pale bronze, which, during their ephemeral youth at least, are of a perfect contour. The faces, it is true, when they are not hidden from you by a fold of the veil, are generally disappointing. The rude labours, the early maternity and lactations, soon age and wither them. But if by chance you see a young woman she is usually an apparition of beauty, at once vigorous ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... menses may come as a surprise to her, and for a while she is more or less confused; she must go over the whole situation and adjust future plans to fit in with this new and all important fact. From a large experience with maternity cases, I have reached the conclusion that the larger percentage of pregnancies do come as a surprise, and in many instances a complete change of program must be painstakingly thought out. This is especially true of the business woman, the professional woman, the busy ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... Tressady's quick eye recognised in the throng a number of familiar types. Well-to-do "pressers" and machinists, factory-girls of different sorts, hundreds of sallow women, representing the home-workers of Mile End, Bow, and Stepney—poor souls bowed by toil and maternity, whose marred fingers labour day and night to clothe the Colonies and the army; their husbands and brothers, too, English slop-tailors for the most part, of the humbler sort—the short side-street was packed ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... all the maternal instincts of her nature sprang to the surface, as she thought of their lives coming without their asking, forced upon them to be battled out through storm and fire. Would that all parents might feel the responsibility of maternity, as that pure being did, who gave the richest, warmest current of her life to bear those children on. "He who has most of heart, knows most of sorrow," and many were the moments of sadness that came to Dawn, as she saw beings ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... vague stirring of what married love at its best must be for a woman, its strange complex of passion and maternity. She wondered if it would ever come to her. She rather thought not. But she was also conscious of a new attitude among the three at the table, her mother's tense watchfulness, her father's slightly squared shoulders, ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... must never be forgotten, that if education be not a training for future duties, it is nothing. The ordinary lot of woman is to marry. Has any thing in these educations prepared her to make a wise choice in marriage? To be a mother! Have the duties of maternity,—the nature of moral influence,—been pointed out to her? Has she ever been enlightened as to the consequent unspeakable importance of personal character as the source of influence? In a word, have any means, direct or indirect, prepared ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... mean—they leap from extreme to extreme. They are violent, immoderate. It is instant night and instant day; it is the maddest passion of summer always. Nature reigns at the top of her voice and chokes her realm with the fervor of her maternity. Nay, give me the north. I would feel the earth's pulse now and then ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... and specialists have not restored, and she lives, a neurasthenic mother of two neurotic children. Happiness has long fled the home where it so loved to bide those early days, before the strain and stress of maternity had drained the ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... B. is better than three months advanced in her progress towards maternity, and, we hope, likely to go well through with it. We have been very little out this season, as I wish to keep her quiet in her present situation. Her father and mother have changed their names to Noel, in compliance with Lord Wentworth's will, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... either in law or equity."[171] The rule of the Stanton case was applied and elaborated in Massachusetts v. Mellon,[172] where the State in its own behalf and as parens patriae sought to enjoin the administration of the Maternity Act[173] which, it was alleged, was an unconstitutional invasion of the reserved rights of the State and an impairment of its sovereignty. The suit was held not justiciable on the ground that a State cannot maintain a suit either to protect ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... joints, and sleeps resting upright against a tree. Make a toad sit upon a cock's egg, and he will hatch a scorpion which will become a salamander. A blind person will recover sight by putting one hand on the left side of the altar and the other on his eyes. Virginity does not hinder maternity. Honest people, lay these truths to heart. Above all, you can believe in Providence in either of two ways, either as thirst believes in the orange, or as the ass believes in the whip. Now I am going to introduce ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... which exasperated her desire for vengeance almost to frenzy. For not only did she acquire the evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute as if Venice had been a city of the United States.... That part of the Adriatic ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... station. Altogether, she had much the bearing of a gentle-woman. Her devotion to me was quite motherly. Never having had any family of her own, although she had been the wife of one of my father's shepherds, she expended the whole maternity of her nature upon me. She was always my first resource in any perplexity, for I was sure of all the help she could give me. And as she had much influence with my father, who was rather severe in his notions, I had had occasion to beg her interference. ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... as he was leaving the maternity ward. He took the elevator down and found a rather sloppily dressed, middle-aged man sitting on a lounge beside a weather-beaten camera that tended to mark ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... experiences lent new interest to their intimacy. They went through all the journey of maternity together. Pretty soon the changes in her body began to be noticeable; and day by day they would watch these. How wonderful it all was, how incredible! Thyrsis would sink upon his knees before her, and clasp his arms about ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... women to tell over their tea-cups, or in their boudoirs, but if any little ordinary physical misery were alluded to, except in the most flippant way, such as the rash on a child's stomach, or the preceding discomforts of maternity, there was a pained and disgusted silence, and an open snub, if possible, for the woman so crude as ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... to the wants of her babe. She had been nursing it at her breast about ten minutes, while her eyes were fixed on its rosy limbs, and her mind revelled in the half-sensuous, half-spiritual delights of maternity, when all at once a mighty clatter of hoofs was heard along the road, followed immediately after by loud shouts of men, the flash of red coats and the clang of sabre-sheaths on the flanks of rushing horses. What ensued ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... churches, where they edified multitudes happily ignorant of the irreverent conditions under which the cheery souled anarchist hunchback droned his snatches of song and extracted from a few tubes of paint some glimpse of heaven, and rays of sunlight, and hints of divine love and divine maternity. ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... what the Northland might do for a child who was fatherless, especially if it were a girl, he knew that, whatever plans he made, they must include his half-breed wife. Moreover, her approaching maternity appealed to the chivalry in his nature, making him ashamed that he had ever thought to leave her. Until his child was born, at whatever risk to himself, he must postpone his departure and lie in hiding at Murder Point. ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... child, very old, over waves, toward the house of maternity, the land of migrations, ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... be? I never dreaded maternity except when—and that lasted such a little while. I do not dread it now. It seems to me it would be a blessed thing for us. But, Adam, Adam, tell me, for I have sat here all day asking myself, whether it is a blessed thing to be born, or ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... you would go and call on old Mr. Wright some time. Take David with you. It would cheer him up." It seemed to William King, thinking of the forlorn old man in his big four-poster, that such a vision of maternity and peace would be pleasant to look upon. "He wouldn't use David's bad word to you, I ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... is thin, and her childlike sweetness has become tender gravity. When she entered on this journey she resembled the girl faces of Greuze; now she is sometimes a mater amabilis, and sometimes a mater dolorosa; for her grief has been to her as a maternity. The great change, so far from diminishing her beauty, has made her seem more fascinating and nobler. Her countenance has had a new birth, and exhibits ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... by general confession ordinary female brains can stand without injury to the physique. The practical consequences of sexual equality have re-established in a more absolute form than ever the principle that the first purpose of female life is marriage and maternity; and that, for their own sakes as for the sake of each successive generation, women should be so trained as to be attractive wives and mothers of healthy children, all other considerations being subordinated to these. A certain small number of ladies ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... the slender body which had four times endured, on behalf of Mr. Tapster, the greatest of woman's natural ordeals. But that thought, it is scarcely necessary to say, did not come to add an extra pang to those which that unfortunate man was now suffering, for Mr. Tapster naturally thought maternity was in every married woman's ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... she had really ceased to love him he could not, durst not, believe; but his nature demanded frequent assurance of affection. Amy had abandoned too soon the caresses of their ardent time; she was absorbed in her maternity, and thought it enough to be her husband's friend. Ashamed to make appeal directly for the tenderness she no longer offered, he accused her of utter indifference, of abandoning him and all but betraying him, that in self-defence she might ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... Anthony stirs up papers with resolution on Kansas men; description by Chicago Herald; seized with nervous prostration at Lakeside, O.; sympathy of people and press; secret of vitality; letter on maternity hospitals; on "hard times;" on woman's dress; Mrs. Stanton's birthday celebration; Miss Anthony magnanimously refuses to take the lead; tribute from Tilton; appreciative letters from Mary Lowe Dickinson, Mrs. Leland Stanford; Twenty-eighth Annual Convention; Utah admitted ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... which the East Indiaman of my early days arrived. The palm groves do not grow with which that hand laid upon the ship placed me in magic conception. As for the lovely Indian maid whom the palmy arches bowered, she has long since clasped some native lover to her bosom, and, ripened into mild maternity, how should I know ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... frame. First of all, there is much pathos in the reappearance in the fuller curves of the face of the child, of the sharper, more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leaves no doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling is further indicated here by the half-humorous pathos of the diminutive, rounded shoulders of the child. You may note a like pathetic power in drawings of a young man seated ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... hundred years ago, the men of pen and the men of brush give us a few touches now and then suggestive of childhood. However, they are observers rather than interpreters of childhood and its meaning. In the works of the great master painters, the dominant note is that of maternity, or the motive is devotional purely. Milton's great ode on the Nativity bears no message other than this. In the graphic tale that Chaucer tells about Hugh of Lincoln, race hatred is the underlying sentiment, and the innocence of ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... minute of his day—and he had many—the colonel spent in his stables superintending the training of The Rogue. He was infinitely worse than a mother with her first child. If the latter acts as if she invented maternity, one would have thought the colonel had fashioned the gelding as the ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... speaking. We know what language means too well here in Boston to play tricks with it. We never make a new word till we have made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! When we shaped the new mould of this continent, we had to make a few. When, by God's permission, we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or two. The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,—this thirty-masted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,—must throw a little spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... him so, with his long, curling lashes brushing his rosy, tear-stained cheek and his chubby fists clasped tightly over his breast as was his habit; her heart grew warm and thrilling with the maternity the picture provoked. ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... under pressure of necessity I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these I was never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards. And if I had been a boarder at an English public school instead ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... the vernacular, does require a status, and those who have need of it merit some consideration. Civilisation, stretching up to recognise that every child is a portion of State wealth, may presently make some movement to recognise maternity as a business or office needing time and strength, not as a mere passing detail thrown in ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... be as supple as silk; at every word take a double turn round him and make a knot. He is a man to fear scandal, and if he has given you a chance to put him in the pillory—in short, understand; threaten him with the ladies of the Maternity Hospital. Besides, he's ambitious. A man succeeds through his wife, and you are handsome and clever enough to make the fortune of a husband. Hey! the mischief! you could hold your own against ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... not she ask if the girl was his daughter? What is that look of paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers and old nurses know so well in men and ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that she was making distinct progress with the child. Since the evening when Peter had won Eleanor's confidence and explained her mental processes, her task had been illumined for her. She belonged to that class of women in whom maternity arouses late. She had not the facile sympathy which accepts a relationship without the endorsement of the understanding, and she was too young to have much toleration for that which was not perfectly ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression. She momentarily forgot that what she looked on was merely superphysical, but regarded it as something alive, something that ought to have been a child, comely and healthy as herself—and she hated it. It was an outrage on maternity, a blot on nature, a filthy discredit to the house, a blight, a sore, a gangrene. It turned over in its sleep, the cover was hurled aside, and a grotesque object, round, pulpy, webbed, and of leprous whiteness—an object which Letty could hardly associate with a hand—came ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... garments should take into account this same quality of warmth; in other respects in selecting them personal taste is an excellent guide. Outfitters carry a variety of maternity garments; patterns for such garments are also sold by dealers, so that those who cannot afford the ready-made clothes will find it easy to have them made at home. Alterations in the clothing are compulsory as pregnancy ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... but what they were most intent to find still eludes them. In the "Histoire de ma Vie" are the records of her parentage, birth, education. Here are detailed the subtile influences that aided or hindered Nature in one of her most lavish pieces of work; here are study, religion, marriage, maternity, authorship, friendship, travel, litigation: but the passionate loving woman, and whom she loved, are not here. To the world's triumph they belong not, and we honor the decency and self-respect which consign them to oblivion. Nor shall we endeavor to lift the veil ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... emotion and a contagious love. As to devotion to the Blessed Virgin, he explained it in a most elevated manner, ever showing, and with great dignity and nobility of manner, how it flowed from the principle of the divine maternity. The last book he sent me was one on the Blessed Virgin written by an American priest. Since Father Hecker's death I have never failed a single day to invoke him in my prayers, and to his intercession I attribute many graces obtained, some of ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... know the secret. It is the baby! No one knows where the porpoise and the whale cradle their newborn infants—it is so difficult to pry into the domestic ways of these sea-people—but evidently the seals cannot manage it, so they are forced to return to the land when the cares of maternity are on them. ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... of this picture is not unique in art, as will have been remarked in passing. The first duty of maternity, and one of its purest joys, is to sustain the newborn life at the mother's breast. A coarse interpretation of the subject desecrates a holy shrine, while a delicate rendering, such as Raphael's or Titian's, invests it with a new beauty. Other pictures of this class should ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... MATERNITY:—Dr. Ridge says:—"It is one of the greatest mistakes to make use of alcoholic beverages to 'keep up the strength' during labor. It is, of course, impossible to predict at the commencement how long the labor will last; if then brandy, or other similar drink, is resorted to ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... grandest works of Raphael in his middle and best style. Of the wonderful feminine grace and tenderness of these, of which no copy can give an idea, I cannot properly speak. From him only have I received the idea of the Immaculate Mother—the union of celestial superiority with human maternity. The innumerable other Madonnas are beautiful pictures; but they are either mere mothers or mere angels. It is the same union in kind with what you may observe in his portrait, where masculine character is so blended and tempered with feminine grace and flexibility. Raphael is ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... before birth, according to the mental and physical condition of the mother, can hardly be doubted. Mothers who live naturally can dismiss all worry on the subject of harm coming to themselves through maternity, for there will be none. The absence of worry has a good effect on both mother ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... toward the stairs, climbed them and went into her room. Recently life had been growing increasingly calm and less beset with doubts. For the first time, with Dick's coming to live with them ten years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... by all who experience this affection, is the union of souls in a true marriage. Whatever of beauty or romance there may be in the lover's dream, is enhanced and spiritualized in the intimate communion of married life. The crown of wifehood and maternity is purer, more divine, than that of the maiden. Passion is ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... me to say that when you speak contemptuously of the vocation of maternity, you dishonor, not only the mother who bore you, but the Lord Jesus Himself, who chose to be born of woman, and to be ministered unto by ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... a back seat when Maternity becomes its competitor. It is well. Otherwise, how could we keep ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... the thing you made a bride and brought To have dominion over hearth and home, To scour the stairs and search the bin for flour, To bear the burden of maternity? Is this the wife they wove who framed our law And pillared a bright land on smiling homes? Down all the stretch of street to the last house There is no shape more angular than hers, More tongued with gabble ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... and Clinical Gynecology, New York University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College; Visiting Physician, Bellevue Hospital; Consulting Obstetrician, New York Maternity Hospital; Attending Physician, Hospital for Ruptured and Crippled, Manhattan Maternity ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... delicate, irritable, affectionate, flexible, and patient is woman than man. The primary matter of which woman is constituted appears to account for this difference. All her organs are tender, yielding, easily wounded, sensible, and receptive; they are made for maternity and affection. Among a thousand women, there is hardly one without these ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... is said that the duties of maternity disqualify for the performance of the act of voting. It can not be, and I think is not claimed by any one, that the mother who otherwise would be fit to vote is rendered mentally or morally less ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... worshipped in all ages of the world, and maternity has been deified by all creeds: from the savage who bowed before the female symbol of motherhood, to the philosophic Comtist who adores woman "in the past, the present, and the future," as mother, wife, and daughter, the worship of the female element in nature has run side by side with ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... the boy's handsome dark eyes, when the mother, young Mrs. Leigh, entered. What a beautiful and kind-looking woman was the good-natured and comely, but unintellectual, girl become! Wifehood and maternity had changed her thus, as I have since seen them change others even less promising than she. Me she had forgotten. I was changed too, though not, I fear, for the better. I made no attempt to recall ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... last rattle, the poor kitten still remained the little mother. Surely she could never be replaced! She was dying because she had had, at her age, a true mother's reason, because her breast was too small and weak for so much maternity. And if her ferocious beast of a father lost his treasure, it was his own fault. After kicking the mother to death, hadn't he murdered the daughter as well? The two good angels would lie in the pauper's grave and all that could be in store for him was to kick the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... WOMEN. On this point they are contradicted by experience; for, although vigorous women may be less likely to conceive, nevertheless they give birth to the healthiest children; so that the advantage of maternity ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... his notice. He hoped much from it. His opinion of the sex would depend on Hadria's power of persistence. In consequence of numberless pupils who had shewn great promise, and then had satisfied themselves with "a stupid maternity," Jouffroy was inclined to regard women with contempt, not as regards their talent, which he declared was often astonishing, but as regards their ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... not a sinister silence. No silence is sinister until it acquires a background of understandable menace. Here there was only the night quiet of Maternity, the silence of noiseless rubber heels on the hospital corridor floor, the faint brush of starched white skirts brushing through doorways ...
— I'll Kill You Tomorrow • Helen Huber
... woman in all her characteristics—with well-formed breasts, menstruating freely and feminine in instincts—he says "mind." The intermediate grades consist, he says, of women whose metabolism leans toward the masculine type. Some have sexual desires but no maternal impulse. Others desire maternity but take no interest in sex activity, or positively shun it. The physical manifestations of masculine glandular activity take the form of pitch of voice, skin texture, shape and weight of bones, etc. Some of the inter-grades are a little hard to define—the human species ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... make a sorry and grotesque appearance. Lenin and Trotsky already figure in woodcuts as Moses and Aaron, deliverers of their people, while the mother and child who illustrate the statistics of the maternity exhibition have the grace and beauty of mediaeval madonnas. Russia is only now emerging from the middle ages, and the Church tradition in painting is passing with incredible smoothness into the service ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... the end of hard times by any means. You see Ned came the next year,—we're such healthy, normal specimens!" She laughed heartily at this admission of her powers of maternity. "And it wasn't eighteen months before Alice was coming.... Oh, I know that we belong to the thriftless pauper class that's always having children,—more than it can properly care for. We ought to be discouraged! But somehow we have fed and clothed 'em all, and ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... selfish, worldly nature, unnoticed at the time, came back upon her ear, having a new significance. They told of a low standard, of impatient self-indulgence, of no acknowledgment of things spiritual and heavenly. Even while this examination was forced upon her, by the new spirit of maternity that had entered into her, and made her child's welfare supreme, she hated and reproached herself for the necessity there seemed upon her of examining and judging the absent father of her child. And so the compelling presence that had taken possession ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... intelligent to be false. They were both high and lame, and, whims for whims, he preferred them to any he had met in a like relation. It was probable enough she would leave them behind—exchange them for politics or "smartness" or mere prolific maternity, as was the custom of scribbling daubing educated flattered girls in an age of luxury and a society of leisure. He noted that the water-colours on the walls of the room she sat in had mainly the quality of being naives, and reflected that naivete in art is like a zero ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... those of the adjoining room where an old black woman crooned lovingly over a little white infant. A new element had been added to the major's consciousness, broadening the scope and deepening the strength of his affections. He did not love Olivia the less, for maternity had crowned her wifehood with an added glory; but side by side with this old and tried attachment was a new passion, stirring up dormant hopes and kindling new desires. His regret had been more than personal at the thought that with himself an old name should be lost to the State; and now ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... course not seldom furnished materials for the scandalous chronicle. Even Madame Joseph herself has either been gallant or calumniated. Report says that to the nocturnal assiduities of Eugene de Beauharnais and of Colonel la Fond-Blaniac she is exclusively indebted to the honour of maternity, and that these two rivals even fought a duel concerning the right of paternity. Eugene de Beauharnais never was a great favourite with Joseph Bonaparte, whose reserved manners and prudence form too great a contrast ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... business—their stoppages from wages and my contributions. I guarantee them 3 per cent.; I give them, actually, the dividends that accrue to the holders of ordinary stock in my company. They also have the general advantages of insurance—sickness, burial, maternity, and so forth—that they would get from an ordinary ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... the city back from the Mohammedans. But the temple where prayer is offered most earnestly, is the small temple near the Yesu-tang, erected to the goddess who has in her power the dispensation of the pleasures of maternity. Rarely did I pass here without seeing two or three childless wives on their knees, praying to the goddess to remove from ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... family. The birth of my poor boy, who is all me—you must have been struck by the likeness? my hair, my eyes, the shape of my face, my mouth, my smile, my teeth!—well, his birth was a relief to me; my thoughts were diverted by the first joys of maternity from my husband, who gave me no pleasure and did nothing for me that was kind or amiable; those joys were all the keener because I knew no others. It had been so often rung into my ears that a mother should respect herself. Besides, a young girl loves ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... the top of the shrine which covered the dead queen who died about one hundred years after the siege of Troy. One side of the panel is sprinkled with yellow and pink rosettes on a pale-blue ground; the other side shows the vulture, the emblem of maternity, holding in its claws the feather of justice; six ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... safe opportunity, considering the levantine view of women as property which Christianity has preserved in our civilization, to obtain gratification for that powerful complex of instincts which we call the sexual, and, in particular, for the instinct of maternity. The woman who has not had a child remains incomplete, ill at ease, and more than a little ridiculous. She is in the position of a man who has never stood in battle; she has missed the most colossal experience of her sex. Moreover, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... while the full and rounded outline of the figure, garbed in a loose robe of crimson, which contrasted beautifully with her luxuriant dark tresses, had that voluptuous development and grace which only maturity and maternity can impart to the female form. In short, never had Mercedes, in the days of her primal bloom, presented a person so fascinating as now. She was a woman to sigh for, perchance to die for, and one whom ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... small in the Avenue, and Madame Restelle boasts, that her wealth has been earned in a large degree by keeping them so. Fashion has its requirements, and before them maternity must give way. Your fashionable lady has no time to give to children, but pets lap-dogs ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... But maternity had nothing but thorns for her. She chafed under the burden and her joy was indecent when the little boy died. Until then he had believed that the path of duty was wide enough and lined sufficiently with flowers to gratify or at ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... athletic husband, (for certainly there is nothing in the gymnasium more amazing than the mother's left arm,) then it is evident that the female frame contains muscular power, or its equivalent, though it may take music or maternity to bring it out. But other inducements have proved sufficient, and the results do not admit of question. The Oriental bayaderes, for instance, are trained from childhood as gymnasts: they carry heavy jars on their heads, to improve strength, gait, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... males have to please them. Look at the cock's feathers, look at the competition there is everywhere, except among humans. The stags and oxen and things all have to fight for us, everywhere. Only in man is the male made the most important. And that happens through our maternity; it's our very ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells |
