"Motherhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... advice was indeed perilous because "the British Empire and all its traditions will decline and fall if the Motherland is faithless to motherhood"; [120] and the nation would do better to pay heed to the following words of His Majesty the King: "The foundations of national glory are in the homes of the people. They will only remain unshaken while the family life of our race and nation ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... and ability of the author enabled him to give just that advice which mothers need so often all through their lives. It covers the whole ground, and, if it be carefully read, will go far towards giving us an "ENLIGHTENED MOTHERHOOD." The work should be read by every wife and every woman who contemplates marriage. Mothers may place it in the hands of their daughters with words of commendation, and feel assured they will be the better prepared for the responsibilities and duties ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... quarrel or fight may very possibly grow up to be a man afraid to meet the battles of life; the girl, if her natural emotions are checked, may lose those very qualities that make for the highest type of womanhood and motherhood. Fortunately, in these days, it is pretty nearly impossible to bring boys and girls up in "glass houses." Doubly fortunate, for they are made happy in their bringing up and are fitted for a world not particularly devoted to ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... night convenient to herself! With the aid of that Inclosure key, she had no doubt often seen the children during their daily walk! In a word, Flossy had been able to enjoy all the privileges of motherhood while having forfeited all ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... friendship. fleksebleco flexibility. ofteco frequency. patreco fatherhood. indeco worthiness. patrineco motherhood. dankemeco thankfulness. ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... hand that gave— Till I rise in my wrath and I sweep on their path and I stamp them into a grave. Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood; Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... with Adam to the trees Where God was walking in the solemn shade. O mother frail, thou hast not known a tear! Thy spirit, clothed in simple innocence, Wears the true garb of bliss. Not yet thy hour Of sorrow and departure; nor the pangs And mystery of motherhood are thine! And yet, weak one! some day, because of thee, God's love shall give a Saviour ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the rights of motherhood among the wealthy indifferent, and from a most important viewpoint. Price . . . . . . ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Raphael's achievement in many directions, he is remembered above all else as a painter of Madonnas. Here was the subject best expressing the individuality of his genius. From the beginning to the end of his career the sweet mystery of motherhood never ceased to fascinate him. Again and again he sounded the depths of maternal experience, always making some ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... are strapping fellows, slight and active. I don't think I ever saw a gipsy who had grown fat. In Germany the gipsy women are often very pretty; but beauty is very uncommon among the Spanish gitanas. When very young, they may pass as being attractive in their ugliness, but once they have reached motherhood, they become absolutely repulsive. The filthiness of both sexes is incredible, and no one who has not seen a gipsy matron's hair can form any conception of what it is, not even if he conjures up the roughest, the greasiest, and the dustiest heads ...
— Carmen • Prosper Merimee
... mistakes that lie foul upon it. When the most holy of human ties, defying nature, becomes the bane of those it binds, it is better to break it than to let one's life cast a daily blot, as it were, on the sanctity of motherhood and the ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... confused, incomplete, and uncertain. In such a situation, open as he is to first impressions, he suffers most, and not infrequently so deeply as to carry emotional scars for life. The friend of children recoils from the thought of any sort of transient motherhood or fatherhood. Monogamy provides a stable home in which each member—husband, wife and child—although they are copartners in love, has an indispensable, ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... word, and puzzled over its possible meaning. The circumstance was a light to the obstacles that beset a child's mind, and a lamp to parents in training that mind. Never was there a mother more fitted than mine, for the glorious responsibilities of motherhood. Very highly educated, she added Latin to her other accomplishments, in order that she might teach the language to me. She had married a second time, and my step-father, a wise and large- hearted man, one of the best men I have ever known, also bestowed ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... extremely. She left Mr. Kingcroft without even the pressure of a rescue-party. She cried a great deal on her return to Sawston, and said she was very sorry. Mrs. Herriton took the opportunity of speaking more seriously about the duties of widowhood and motherhood than she had ever done before. But somehow things never went easily after. Lilia would not settle down in her place among Sawston matrons. She was a bad housekeeper, always in the throes of some domestic crisis, which Mrs. Herriton, who kept her servants for ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... in the pages that follow. I know that it means very different things to different people; but that is only because evil always takes advantage of ambiguity. I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence; with silver-tongued rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity. But that is only because evil is always flattered, as the Furies were called "The Gracious Ones." I know that it numbers many disciples whose intentions are entirely innocent and humane; and who would be sincerely astonished at my ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... did, you were bound by every consideration to be true and loyal to that love and to him. Instead, from beginning to end, you have been false to him, false to his memory, false to your own wifehood and motherhood, false to yourself! I have not come here to reproach you, however. I will only say that I do not believe the capacity—the capability even—of love exists, or has ever existed, within you. But," he continued, in gentler tones, "the capacity for suffering does exist, and I can see ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... necessary to dwell upon all these well-known details to understand what follows and the directions which her mind now took. Milmine's analysis is here penetrating and conclusive. She had always been in revolt against her environment. Her marriages had been unhappy; motherhood had brought her nothing; she had been poor and dependent; her strong will and self-assertive personality had been turned back ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... beauty of the Christ Child, The gentleness, the grace, The smiling, loving tenderness, The infantile embrace! All babyhood he holdeth, All motherhood enfoldeth— Yet who hath ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... claim on the world; even if that claim rest solely on the fact of her motherhood, and not, alas, on any other. Her life may be a cipher, but when the child comes, God writes a figure before ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... love love, for love is life, and light and joy and sweetness. And love is comradeship and motherhood, and fatherhood and all dear kinship. Love is the joy of service so deep that self is forgotten. Wohelo ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... that of 2,000,000! Among the number how many are young widows, girls engaged to marry men now dead, and how many whose natural vocation was marriage, motherhood, home-making, and all that is meant by such things as these? If this be the normal vocation of the normal woman how many of these have been deprived of all that seemed to them to make life worth living? Is it astonishing if they rebel? If they determine ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... from her. That kind of cant is wearisome. You did not think me too young to put at the head of a house, or to run the risk of becoming a mother, although I have heard you dilate yourself on the horrors of premature motherhood. But that is the way with men. For anything that suits their own convenience they are ingenious in finding excuses. As a rule, they see but one side of a social question, and that is their own. I cannot understand any but unsexed women associating with vivisectors. Don't pretend you pursue such ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... her followers to revolt: the refusal to women of a generous education, of a living wage, of opportunities for professional distinction; the social habit of amused contempt at women's doings; the meanness that used a woman's capacity for mating and motherhood to bind her a slave either of the kitchen or of the streets. All these things Ellen knew to be true, because she was poor and had had to drink life with the chill on, but it did not sadden her to have her reluctant views confirmed by ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... you I won't betray confidence. The girl is an enthusiast. Now enthusiasts are always morbid and unhappy unless they can find vent for their energies. Why don't you give her the natural and healthy vents supplied by wifehood and motherhood? Why do you wait for Hinton's first brief to make them happy? You have money enough to make them happy ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... him lash the horses down the hill and force them at the drift—he, the man who loved horses, and knew them as he knew his children. His children! She fled into the house to do her office, and to drink to the bottom of the cup the bitterness of motherhood. A cool bed, linen, cold water and hot water, brandy and milk, all the insignia of the valley of the shadow did she put to hand, and con over and adjust and think upon, and then there was the waiting. She waited on the stoep, burning and tortured, ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... the agony to be, that what should be a joy, the birth of children, will be a woe, and the sweet duties of motherhood a curse, while the childless will be happier than the fugitives burdened with helpless infancy. We should note, too, that the 'distress' which comes upon the land is presented in darker colours, and traced to its origin, in (God's)'wrath' dealt out 'unto ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... or legal position as either of these cases indicate, although here again personal testimony brings to light notable exceptions of the social behavior of individuals in certain localities, where this type, that is, the colored offspring of white motherhood, was regarded as a separate class, above the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... conviction that if the right man talked to a roomful of young, unmarried women upon the great ideals of motherhood—and his words were wise and pure enough—that not one of the women in the room would bring forth the children afterward that would have come to them had they not been there to listen. I believe that many young women of the arriving generation are tremendously ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... wasn't so big I would shake thee, Joseph! The idea of John Randolph being in this house and thee beating round the bush with thine angels!" and with all her motherhood shining in her eyes, Ruth Makepeace started ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... made beautiful with all that gold can give Unhappy souls at odds with life, not knowing how to live. He saw fair, pampered women turn from motherhood's sweet joy, Obsessed with methods to prevent or mania to destroy. He saw men sell their souls to vice and avarice and greed; He heard race quarrelling with race and creed decrying creed; And shameful wealth and waste He saw, and shameful want ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... singular grace and beauty, had combined therein the utilitarian indications of ability to plentifully reproduce her kind. Isom wanted her because she was alert and quick of foot, and strong to bear the burdens of motherhood; for even in the shadow of his decline he still held to the hope of his youth—that he might leave a son behind him to guard his acres and bring ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... our States have enacted measures in aid of motherhood, the District of Columbia is still without such a law. A carefully considered bill will be presented, which ought to have most thoughtful consideration in order that the Congress may adopt a measure which will be hereafter a model for ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that he did not. And now she was sure one was coming. But it was more than that. She had not reached, and knew she could not reach, that point of spirit-union which alone makes marriage sacred, and the sacrifices demanded by motherhood a joy. She was fairly caught in the web of her foolish and presumptuous mistake! So few months of marriage—and so sure that it was a failure, so hopeless for the future! In the light of this new certainty, it was terrifying. A hard, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... once suffered, how ready you are to sympathize with those who are going through the same severe trials. If a member of your own home or a friend is passing through the trying ordeal of motherhood, and you have suffered the same, how you can advise, suggest, comfort, guide! If you have had a personal experience of intense agony once every month, do you not think you are in a far better position to talk with one who is suffering in the same way than you would be if you had never ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... You remember, my dear aunt, the good Lady Culham, who was our Dorsetshire neighbour, and tried hard to mend my ways at Carteron? This poor Duchess—for so she called herself—was just such another. A woman made for comfort, housewifery, and motherhood, and by no means for racing about Europe in charge of a disreputable parent. I could picture her settled equably on a garden seat with a lapdog and needlework, blinking happily over green lawns and mildly rating an errant gardener. I could fancy her ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... of kindred nature, how many of the stricken and bereaved women of our country might find at once a home and an object in life! Motherless hearts might be made glad in a better and higher motherhood; and the stock of earthly life that seemed cut off at the root, and dead past recovery, may be grafted upon with a shoot from the tree of life which is in the Paradise ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of married life, of fatherhood and motherhood; it destroys social life, club life, business life, and religious life. It robs a man of friendships and makes his days long, gloomy periods, instead of rapidly-passing epochs of joy and happiness. It throws ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... left the creche he began to speak of the horror the babies in their incubating cases had caused him. "Is motherhood gone?" he said. "Was it a cant? Surely it was an instinct. This ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... water, in the pools and little streams and the hollows between the ridges, the voice of it in the morning was a babel of sound. Out of the sweet breast of the earth he could feel the irresistible pulse of motherhood filling him with its strength and its courage, and whispering to him its everlasting message that because of the glory and need and faith of life had God created this land of twenty-hour day and four-hour twilight. In it, in these days of summer, was no ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... his character. The two women who should mean most in a man's life had both failed him. He bore on his body a scar which surely he must never see reflected in the mirror without recalling the travesty of motherhood that was all he had ever known. And scored into his soul, hidden beneath a bitter reticence and unforgiving cynicism, lay the still deeper scar of that hurt which the woman who was to have been his wife ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... wrote to Clara, and gave her long accounts of what she saw and did in Italy; but Clara was absorbed in the cares of matrimony and motherhood. She had nothing but actualities to offer in return for the idealities which were Lettice's mental food and drink. This had always been the basis of their friendship; and it is a basis on which many a firm ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... reading a great book by Dr. Ernestus Parker, on 'Motherhood.' It would be a great benefit to both you ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... marvelous illustration how God hath always been caring for us without our help! For who can boast that he took any part in his formation in the womb? Who gave to our mother that loving care wherewith she fed and fondled and caressed us, and performed all those duties of motherhood, when we had as yet no consciousness of our life, and when we should neither know nor remember these things, but that, seeing the same things done to others, we believe that they were done to us also? For they were performed on us as though we had been asleep, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... Joseph's case nothing could be more revolutionary in appearance than the truth he was asked to accept. He was asked to believe in the virgin-motherhood of his bethrothed, and in the fact that the Child soon to be born was He Who was to save Israel from his sins. He was asked to accept these incredible statements and to act upon them by taking Mary to wife as he had proposed. And he did not hesitate to accept the evidence of a ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... my dear, of . . . of woman's wrong-doing . . . as woman . . . of motherhood, without marriage!' All Stephen's nature seemed to rise ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... sufficient harmony with them to be properly called of their school. To one of these followers of Praxiteles, some say as a copy of a work of the master himself, we must attribute the Demeter now in the British Museum. This is a pathetic illustration of suffering motherhood. There is no exaggeration in the grief, only the calm dignity of a sorrow which in spite of hope refuses ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the weeping parents and went her way. "What a splendid creature," said the doctor to himself as he looked after her. "She has eyes like Fate, and the face of Motherhood Incarnate. A great woman, if ever I saw one, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... of names. Bessie declared herself delighted with the chance of seeing Lady Ivinghoe, whom she considered more to realise the beauty of women than any one she had hitherto beheld, and the fair face had not lost its simplicity, but rather gained in loveliness by the sweetness of early motherhood, as she and Phyllis sat by Mysie, regaling her with tales of what they regarded as the remarkable precocity of the infant Claude, reluctantly left ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... sketch might have been a mere piece of domestic prettiness; but the handling of it was so strong and free that it became a significant, typical thing. It breathed the North, a life rustic and withdrawn—the sweetness of home and motherhood. ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... their progeny, into the unknown future, their expression that of rude but questioning courage, the man splendid in his virility, superb in the attitude of his awkward strength, ready to meet whatever be the call of earth. His mate meanwhile suggests the overwhelming and eternal instincts of motherhood. ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... What motherhood in its deep grief and joy, what sisterhood and wifehood may be, have never been sung with more penetration and exquisiteness than Wordsworth sang them. But of the immense range, beyond, of womanhood he could not sing. Byron's women are mostly in love with Byron under various names, and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... time, my dear," remembering that he had a daughter of his own, nearly the builder's age, "we men have come to think of women primarily as potential mothers, and secondarily as people of affairs. And considering that motherhood is something that is denied to ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... however, an event took place which did much to alleviate Julie's hitherto deplorable existence. A daughter was born to her, and she determined to nurse her child herself. For two years motherhood, its all-absorbing multiplicity of cares and anxious joys, made life less hard for her. She and her husband lived necessarily apart. Her physicians predicted improved health, but the Marquise herself put no faith in these auguries based on theory. Perhaps, like many a one for whom life ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... she said, and all her motherhood rushed forward to seize, as it had ever done, those "scraps" of others' lives, "suppose the time should come when there would be in your life another—someone besides Larry? Why has all this ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... smothered with blessings from the two poor widows and Joseph. As to the newspaper, it ceased to exist at the end of two months, just as Finot had predicted. Philippe's crime had, therefore, so far as the world knew, no consequences. But Agathe's motherhood had received a deadly wound. Her belief in her son once shaken, she lived in perpetual fear, mingled with some satisfactions, as she saw ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... room, and threw herself on her bed and writhed there, torn by many pangs. The pang of the heart and the pang of the half-born spirit, struggling with the body that held it back from birth; and through it all the pang of the motherhood she had thwarted and disowned. Out of the very soil of corruption it pierced, sharp and pure, infinitely painful. It was almost indiscernible from the fierce exultation of her heart that had found fulfilment, and from ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... to in the last quarter of a century of fairly regular church attendance; once I heard an Englishman preaching bitterly of the Suffragettes' militant methods, and he said they should all "be condemned to motherhood to tame their wild spirits." And I surely had the desire to slam the door that morning, for I thought I never heard a more terrible insult to all womankind than to speak of motherhood as a punishment. But I stayed through the service; I stayed after the service! I interviewed ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... half a century, sum them up, and offer them to God as a meet and fitting sacrifice—the destruction, by fine degrees of petty suffering, of one woman's whole life, almost from the beginning, and quite to the end, with the total annihilation of all its human possibilities, of love, of motherhood, of reasonable enjoyment and legitimate happiness. That was the formula for salvation which Maria Addolorata had received ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... strengthening of men, to seed the select, to winnow the weak. It was white logic, applied firmly, as by a white man. But somehow the stars multiplied and kept Cissie's image before Peter—a cold, frightened girl, harassed with coming motherhood, peering at those chill, distant lights out of the blackness of ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... shocked Mr. Thorndike. For the woman he felt a thrill of sympathy, but at once saw that it was superfluous. From the secure and lofty heights of motherhood, Mrs. Bernard smiled down upon the assistant district attorney as upon a naughty child. She did not even deign a protest. She continued merely to smile. The smile reminded Thorndike of the smile on the face of a mother in a painting by Murillo he had lately presented to the chapel in the college ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... voice rose shrewishly, riding the high waves of the baby's incessant outcry against the restrictions upon appetite imposed by enlightened motherhood. "You do, and see what'll happen! You'd have him howling with colic, that's what ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... chastity she had not. Henceforth, happy or not happy, opulent or beggared, she had in her heart a pure, untainted sentiment, the highest of all human feelings because the most disinterested. Love has its egotism, but motherhood has none. La Marana was a mother like none other; for, in her total, her eternal shipwreck, motherhood might still redeem her. To accomplish sacredly through life the task of sending a pure soul ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... eyes contentment had returned because gay and hopeful young flags of green flew from every twig of the tree of augury, and in her deep pupils dwelt the serene sweetness that broods on thoughts of approaching motherhood. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... about to embrace her, but she briskly, turned away. She could not endure that. If he did it, the pent-up motherhood would break forth, and her courage would take flight. She was something more than the "parokeet of Pernambukoko," as Patsy Kernaghan had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... But after all, savage doesn't mean anything but wild, untamed. You're that, you know, old lady. Untamed even by motherhood. And I'd have thought that would have tamed even Petruchio's handful. But this Maori woman I was thinking about was in the King Country in New Zealand—You know, I'd read 'The Blue Lagoon' and thought it a ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... elsewhere parsimonious, she seems frequently extravagant; yet that extravagance is the cheapest means of attaining the necessary end. Thus, when woman's passion is no longer required for the function of motherhood, its impulsion may yet be counted on for the psychological explanation of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... impurity. Such a notion is the result of a perverted idea of the sacredness of natural functions—a seeing of impurity—where all is pure. What a perversion, this regarding the sacredness of human Fatherhood, and Motherhood, as impure! The man of true spirituality sees in the Divine Trinity of Father, Mother and Child, something most pure and sacred—something that brings man very close indeed to God. Is the beautiful babe, held close in its mother's fond embrace, a symbol and type of impurity? ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... magnolia-petals, and now the head-nurse and the grand-equerry wheeled her couch of state into the Hall of Amethyst, that she might receive the tender wishes of the good fairies, while yet the sweet languor of her motherhood kept her from the fresh wind and bright ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... attached to those who ignored natural ties and duties, thus lowering the social and domestic standard, and setting the nun's habit above the woman, the wife and the mother. Yet nature had asserted itself even in the convent. The motherhood in the monastic woman made her the mother, the caretaker, the nurse, the teacher, and the helper of all those who needed maternal care, while condemning and ignoring its common aspects ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... woodsy beach cottage; can't you see the little figure—the two or three little figures!—scampering ahead of us through the country roads, or around the fire? Oh, I can," said Cherry, her extraordinary voice rich and sweet with longing, "I can! That would be motherhood, Peter, that wouldn't be like having a baby whose father one didn't—one COULDN'T love, ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... wanted to think about, as he himself "lived in a happy erotic state, ennobled and beautified by the rejuvenating and expiatory arrival of children." But nevertheless he decided to write such a book, and so with sympathy and much old-fashioned veneration for motherhood the task was undertaken. ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... meanwhile those who deal specifically with the marriage laws should never allow themselves for a moment to forget this abomination that "plucks the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love, and sets a blister there," and then calmly calls itself purity, home, motherhood, respectability, honor, decency, and any other fine name that happens to be convenient, not to mention the foul epithets it hurls freely at those who are ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... crowded the doorsteps; there were young mothers that sat there, with their babes clasped to the full breasts, in whose eyes was to be read the satisfied passion of recent motherhood; there were gay clusters of young Norman maidens, whose glances, brilliant and restless, were pregnant with all the meaning of unspent youth. The figures of the fishermen, toiling up the street with bared legs and hairy breast, bending beneath their ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... her as I saw her then. She sat On a low chair, the child upon her knees, Not six months old. Radiant with motherhood, Her full face beamed upon the face below, Bent over it, as with love to ripen love; Till its intensity, like summer heat, Gathered a mist across her heaven of eyes, Which grew until it dropt in large slow tears, The earthly outcome of the heavenly ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... me, Lucio: listen, brother dear, First playmate-child, tending whose innocence Myself learned motherhood. Shall I deny Youth to be loved and follow after love? There is a love breaks like a morning beam On the husht novice kneeling by his arms; And worse there is, whose kisses strangle love, Whose feet take hold of hell. My Lucio, Follow ...
— The Vigil of Venus and Other Poems by "Q" • Q
... not know how she was revealing to Allan the unconscious motherhood in her; but Allan, femininely sensitive to unspoken things from his long sojourn in the dark—Allan did. It was the mother-instinct that she was spending on him, but mother-instinct of a kind he had never known before; gayly self-effacing, efficient, shown ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... beyond the time of motherhood were suckling infants, while all the young women seemed well provided with children. Girls of five or six were playing games with sleeping infants strapped to their backs, and even boys were impressed into this nursery work. The younger children are clothed only in kimonos, ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... Margherita looked down upon the street which she had grown to love—the suggestion of darkness had softened it, mellowed it with a twilight beauty, like the face of an old friend seen in the glow of lamplight. The shouting of urchins at play floated upward, stirring the chords of motherhood in her breast and emphasizing her loneliness. With Oliveta gone what would be left? Nothing but an austere life compressed within drab walls; nothing but sickness and suffering on every side. She had begun to think a great deal about those walls of late and—The bells of ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means? Would ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... as in our own rubber goods. The same end is accomplished in the one case as in the other. The two, three or twenty cash doll does for the Chinese girl what the two, three or twenty dollar one does for her antipodal sister,—develops the instinct of motherhood, besides standing a greater amount of rough handling. Nevertheless it usually comes to the same deplorable end, departing this world, bereft of its arms and legs, without going through the tedious process of ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... she returned from a ride to find Evelyn again at the detested davenport, her head bowed upon her arms, like a flower broken with the wind, all the inherent motherhood in her rose up and overflowed. Hastily crossing the room she knelt down beside the small tragic figure and kissed a pearl-white fragment of forehead; the only spot available at the moment. "Poor darling!" she whispered. "Is it really ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... anyway? Yet her first glimpse told her that this was a mother to be proud of. "The most beautiful mother in the world" he had called her, and surely this woman could be none other than the one who had mothered such a son. Her highest ideals of motherhood seemed realized as she gazed upon the peaceful face ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... exceedingly proud of the somewhat rounded form of her waist. All women display an innocent artfulness, the first time they find themselves facing motherhood. Like a soldier who makes a brilliant toilet for his first battle, they love to play the pale, the suffering; they rise in a certain manner, and walk with the prettiest affectation. While yet flowers, they bear a fruit; they enjoy their maternity ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... began Mrs. Yocomb, in a voice that she tried to render quiet and resigned. "Who art thou to judge God? 'What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know—' Oh, my child, my child!" broke out her wailing cry, and motherhood triumphed. ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... the important fact, which it is the present writer's constant effort to bring to the notice of Eugenists, that alcohol has special relations to motherhood, to which there can necessarily be no correspondence in the case of the other sex, and though motherhood, as such, is not the subject of this book, yet it would be most pedantically to limit the usefulness which one hopes it may ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... a moment, "I wonder if you even know what things are being said about what we've always believed in . . . motherhood for ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... of everything, made the virgin for love; but with the first child her bosom loses form, her beauty its freshness. Woman is made for motherhood. Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the loss of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps. Behold the family, the human law; everything that departs from this ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners, (considering the advantages enjoy'd,) probably the meanest to be ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... usual line of masculine logic, had frequently turned over the problem of Morgana's complex character such as it appeared to him,—and had almost come to the conclusion that if he only had patience he would succeed in persuading her that wifehood and motherhood were more conducive to a woman's happiness than all the most amazing triumphs of scientific discovery and attainment. He was perfectly right according to simple natural law,—but he chose to forget that women's mental outlook has, in these modern days, been greatly widened,—whether for their gain ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... point that it is not mere knowledge of physiology that will meet the case. He considers that the most important thing of all is to establish in the minds of the children noble ideals with regard to infanthood and motherhood. Lessons in connection with the care of all birds and animals for their young, with the love and devotion of parents for their young, with all that is beautiful and tender connected with the homes of animals ...
— Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922) • Committee Of The Board Of Health
... "Not docile motherhood, Dutiful, frequent, closed in all distress; Not shedding of the unoffending blood; Not little ...
— A Father of Women - and other poems • Alice Meynell
... looked like a goddess, exiled to earth, and altogether shabby—a deity in reduced circumstances—but none the less divinely fair and kind. Her great love for her child had so moulded her that she seemed the very incarnation of motherhood. So might Ceres have appeared as she wandered forlornly in search of her lost Persephone, gentle, weary, her fineness a little blunted ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... bravely, but there was a little cloud of doubt drifting across the sky of my heart. Marriage is so different from what the romance-fiddlers try to make it. Even Dinky-Dunk doesn't approve of my mammalogical allusions. Yet milk, I find, is one of the most important issues of motherhood—only it's impolite to mention the fact. What makes me so impatient of life as I see it reflected in fiction is its trick of overlooking the important things and over-accentuating the trifles. It primps and tries to be genteel—for Biology doth make ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... very naturally, turned the conversation into another channel; she was a quieter Rosamund in those days of waiting than the Rosamund unaffected by motherhood. That Rosamund had been vigorous and joyous; this Rosamund was strongly serene. In all she was and did at this time Dion felt strength; but it was shown chiefly in stillness. She worked sometimes; she read a great deal sitting upstairs in her own little ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... had flowed unmixed through many generations from the divine fountain of life and light, our Father the Sun. I dreamt of Golden Star, and the days when I loved her in timid silence, for she was the fairest of all our race, and so, as it seemed to me, destined to no less a lot than the motherhood of a long line of Incas, in whom should live and grow to ever greater splendour the glories of the race that owned no ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... that the squaw could, at least, understand English; and the gleam of motherhood, kindling at her ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... that, Rosalind had a background belief that a time would come when a complete revelation would be possible. Her mind stipulated for a wider experience for Sally before then. It would be so infinitely easier to tell her tale to one who had herself arrived at the goal of motherhood, utterly unlike as (so she took for granted) was to be the way of her arrival, sunlit and soft to tread, from the black precipice and thorny wastes that had brought ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... days I believe it is going to be discovered that the atmosphere and the encompassing radiance and sweetness of Heaven are composed of the dear sighs and loving aspirations of earthly motherhood. If it turns out otherwise, rest assured Heaven will not have reached its perfect point of evolution. Why is it, then, that mothers will—will—will—try, so mistakenly, to extirpate the jewel of honest, manly savagery from the breasts of their boys? I wonder if they ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... for the realization of an even more precious one took possession of her. She comforted herself with the thought that maybe life had brought Martin merely as a door to the citadel which looms, sparkling with dancing sunlight, in the midst of mysterious shadows. Motherhood—she would feel as if she were in another world. Out of all this disappointment ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... give you—all unasked you went, Sons of a greater motherhood than ours; To our proud hearts your young brief lives were lent, Then swept beyond us by resistless powers. Only we hear, when we have lost our all, That far ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... women's organizations in every country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil from an altogether new point of view. Certain very ugly facts, which touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare of children, were brought forth—facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... of academic and timid discussion into the field of practical politics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political world, it is possible to estimate just how effectually that grafting ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... yaller baby didn't cry very long. Seemed like it knowed there wuz a mother holdin' it,—not its own mother, but a woman whose life hed been hallowed by God's blessin' with the love 'nd the purity 'nd the sanctity uv motherhood. ...
— A Little Book of Profitable Tales • Eugene Field
... Hugh consented at once. And hand in hand they went through the tangled underwood and past the shimmering falls; and as Hugh looked down on his little wife and saw the new sweet womanliness that had grown on her with her motherhood, and the meek purity of her fair young face, he felt a proud happiness thrilling within him, and knew that it was God-given, and that its blessing would last ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... interest and teach us. I am sure it does; long may it flourish! But so likewise does the dressing and undressing of dolls, the opening of the front of the house, and the tenderly putting of them away to bed in rooms they completely fill, train our little dears to the duties and the joys of motherhood. Toys! what wise child despises them? Art, fiction, the musical glasses: are they not preparing us for the time, however distant, when we shall at last ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of our life, marriage, our natural instincts alone are brought into play. Marriage—clothe the naked fact in what flowers of rhetoric we will- -has to do with the purely animal part of our being. The man is drawn towards it by his primeval desires; the woman by her inborn craving towards motherhood." ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... which these monstrous limitations would be alleviated, in which women would stand on their own feet in equal citizenship with men. For a time she brooded on the ideals and suggestions of the Socialists, on the vague intimations of an Endowment of Motherhood, of a complete relaxation of that intense individual dependence for women which is woven into the existing social order. At the back of her mind there seemed always one irrelevant qualifying spectator whose presence she sought to disregard. She would ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... stroke of the brush had been made and stepping back to view the work, his heart sank within him, for here he had succeeded in catching the look of lovely maternity, with the expression of the earthly mother imprinted thereon, but the combination of human love and Divine motherhood ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... the halo of motherhood, richly dowered with intellectual gifts, distinguished for learning, gentleness, and refinement, Beruriah is a truly poetic figure. Incensed at the evil-doing of the unrighteous, her husband prayed for their destruction. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... of the hair was shining and abundant, and very black. A turn of the head showed a lean Greek profile, an outline bulbous and Armenian, the smooth creamy mask of a Jewess, while here and there glimmered something more opulent and inviting still, which proclaimed, if it did not confess, the remote motherhood of the zenana and the origin of the sun. An audience of fluttering fans and wrinkled shirt collars—the evening was warm under the gas-lights—sensuous, indolent, already amused with itself. Not an old woman in it from end to ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... is different. Better education of women in domestic work and the requirements of wifehood and motherhood; the growth of a juster and more wholesome feeling in the man, that he may refuse to demand that his wife add wage-work to her domestic drudgery; and above all, a clearer and more generally diffused perception in society ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... not answer these questions but she cried over the letter a great deal and brooded over Sandy with all the motherhood that nature had not legitimately utilized. And then, one night, Sandy came to her quite simply and directly and claimed, in his great suffering need, what she ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... the shortness of life and nearness of eternity when I see how many that I have traveled with are gone within the veil. Then there are all my own letters, written in the first two years of marriage, when Mr. Stowe was in Europe and I was looking forward to motherhood and preparing for it—my letters when my whole life was within the four walls of my nursery, my thoughts absorbed by the developing character of children who have now lived their earthly life and gone to the eternal ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... and motherhood God has given the special distinction above all estates that are beneath it that He not simply commands us to love our parents, but to honor them. For with respect to brothers, sisters, and our neighbors in general He commands nothing higher than that we love them, so that He separates and distinguishes ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... The prostitute giving away that which was meant to be kept. The virgin keeping that which was meant to be given away. A force contending with a force. Drawing in opposite directions when they should be pulling together. Through it all, motherhood misunderstood. And fatherhood misunderstood. The body cheapened to the soul. And the soul cheapened to the body. Every child being a slap in ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... hired to do the "nursing." There is no genuine nurse but the mother; and although others may do well under her eye and directed by her, she can never shift the mother-responsibility to other shoulders; and if she be worthy of the dignity of motherhood, she will never wish to have ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... and kill a tenderness which has no experience of life. The wife of a poet should love him long before she marries him; she must train herself to the charity of angels, to their forbearance, to all the virtues of motherhood. Such qualities, mademoiselle, are but germs ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... learn what Jim and his companion learned. He can learn to respect motherhood and to be considerate of mothers as mothers. It is very interesting to see the great differences in this regard between families in which the fact of motherhood is a secret, and those in which it ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can still find it in them to forgive her for all that she has done and all that she may ever do. That's motherhood, I suppose." ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... there was a poison in his mother's beauty, a dread in her influence over his impressionable young wife, thrilled with the awakening forces of her consonant being. Moya would drink deep of every cup that life presented. Motherhood was her lesson for the day. "She is a queen of mothers!" she would exclaim with an abandon that was painful to Paul; he saw deformity where Moya was ready to kneel. "I love her perfect love for you—for me, even! She is above all jealousy. She doesn't even ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... gesticulations, cries, horrors, nor too many tears. The Virgin hardly breaks into a single sob, and the intense suffering of the drama is expressed by scarce a gesture of inconsolable motherhood, a tearful face, or red eyes. The Christ is one of the most elegant figures that Rubens ever imagined for the painting of a God. It possesses some peculiar extended, pliant, and almost tapering grace, that gives it every natural delicacy and all the distinction ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... the mother of his foe, He will not speak to her in hate; My boy will never stoop so low As motherhood to desecrate. But she shall know what once I knew— Eyes that are glorious to see, The light of manhood ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... people fought with misery received for a while its due reward; but an event which usually crowns the happiness of a household to them proved fatal. Ginevra had a son, who was, to use the popular expression, "as beautiful as the day." The sense of motherhood doubled the strength of the young wife. Luigi borrowed money to meet the expenses of Ginevra's confinement. At first she did not feel the fresh burden of their situation; and the pair gave themselves wholly up to ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... anxious to see him before anyone else did, for those who went in and out of the child's room were so blind, so persistent in their fears with regard to the little girl's ultimate recovery; if Mrs. Ogilvie could only get Philip to herself, she would assure him that the instincts of motherhood never really failed, that her own instincts assured her that the great doctors were wrong, and she herself was right. The child was slowly but gradually returning to the paths ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... this happy news, or dreadful but profitable? Hapless am I, if I save my life at the cost of my own miseries. Strong is the tie of motherhood; no parent hates a child even if outraged by him. Yet, now that he is gone, I shall have rest and peace ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... their love, out of their conversation, all pride out of their common life. To permit each other freedom was blank dishonor. That I and Anna should love, and after our love-journey together, go about our separate lives and dine at the public tables, until the advent of her motherhood, would have seemed a terrible strain upon our unmitigable loyalty. And that I should have it in me to go on loving Nettie—who loved in different manner both Verrall and me—would have outraged the very quintessence of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... highest earthly ideal for a woman is that she should be a good wife and a good mother. It is not necessary to say this in direct words to every small girl, but she ought to be so educated, so guided, as to instinctively realise that wifehood and motherhood is the flower and perfection of her being. This is the hope and ideal that should sanctify her lessons and sweeten the right and proper discipline of life. All learning, all handicraft, and all artistic training ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... recovered and was restored to strength, of course these cares ceased. But now the new instincts of motherhood absorbed her, and, brooding over the rosy child that was her own, caressing its waking, or hanging above its sleep, she scarce noted that her husband's absences from home grew more and more frequent, that strange visitors ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... superstitions about morality and propriety and so forth. But I know, and the whole world really knows, though it dare not say so, that you were right to follow your instinct; that vitality and bravery are the greatest qualities a woman can have, and motherhood her solemn initiation into womanhood; and that the fact of your not being legally married matters not one scrap either to your own worth or to ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... when the first evidences of motherhood manifest themselves, the husband procures a white or black chicken and after inviting a few friends, holds an informal party in honor of the occasion. I know of one case in which the ritual waving ceremony[1] took place on pregnancy, but it was performed, so the husband told ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... them on their backs, they will lie there till they die, like the turtle, unable to turn itself over. Not content with having ceased to suckle their children, women no longer wish to do it; with the natural result motherhood becomes a burden; means are found to avoid it. They will destroy their work to begin it over again, and they thus turn to the injury of the race the charm which was given them for its increase. This practice, with other causes of depopulation, ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... more and more to continue bearing children until they are exhausted whilst numbers of others are bearing no children at all. Even if every woman bearing and rearing a valuable child received a handsome series of payments, thereby making motherhood a real profession as it ought to be, the number of women able or willing to give more of their lives to gestation and nursing than three or four children would cost them might not be very large if the advance in social organization and conscience indicated by such payments involved ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... little Mary: you are as old as your mother—as old as all motherhood, in your wisdom. I feel more foolishly a boy each day, as I realize the depth of ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... to a point. "What," she asked, in the tones of delighted motherhood overlaid with a slight exasperation which she habitually used toward Burnaby, "has tea got to do with a man you met on the Upper Liara last summer and a man you met this ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... "Ever since Carthoris disappeared, Dejah Thoris has grieved and mourned for her lost boy. The blow of years ago, when you did not return from the atmosphere plant, was lessened to some extent by the duties of motherhood, for your son broke his white shell that ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... women, I am willing to take a back seat with them. It seems to me that every man who had a mother should have a proper regard for womanhood. My own mother was a combination of all the best elements of the high character that belong to true wife and motherhood. Her devotion and friendship were as eternal as the very stars of heaven, and no misfortune could dwarf her generous impulses or curdle the milk of human kindness in her good heart. Her memory has been an altar, a guiding star, ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... of womanhood. One presents the Madonna brooding over the mystery of motherhood; the other, more confusedly, tells of the acolyte, the priestess, the clairvoyante of the unknown gods. This latter exists complete in herself, a personality as definite and as significant as a symbol. She is behind all the processes of art, though she rarely becomes ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... Lesche, near the training-ground, where talk was often free and even merry. The whole aim of the discipline was to form the soldier. Marriage was delayed for the sake of vigorous offspring. The girls were trained for motherhood. They were subject to a system of athletic exercises, and engaged in contests of running, wrestling, and boxing. The boys were put under training at the age of eight years. They became accustomed to severe exercise, and were inured to patient ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... what you'd call sick," Lily tried to reassure herself; "he's a reg'lar rascal!" she ended, tenderly; her eyes—those curious amber eyes, through which sometimes a tigress looks!—looked now at Maurice in passionate motherhood. ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... sake of the lost, Kate Lee voluntarily laid aside her own hopes of marriage and motherhood. Detached and in a sense lofty in her walk amongst her comrades, still there were those who had coveted her as a continual comrade in the war, and had made their plea. Once she almost yielded, but pity for the unsaved prevailed over the ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... betterment of social conditions: "We have been too prudish. Because we have been unwilling to teach school children the evils of violating sex hygiene, we have been unsuccessful in combating evils justly attributable to ignorance on the part of girls as to the duties and dangers of motherhood." This point of view is shared by so many men and women that a national body was organized in 1905 to promote the teaching of sex hygiene,—the Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis. This society has its headquarters in New ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... with a human heart beneath. The veneer of gentility had underneath it the pure gold of character. She seized the helm of the family ship with a heroic hand. She sailed steadily through a sea of troubles that often threatened to overwhelm her; the unaccustomed task of motherhood with its hundred trials, her brother's gloom and despair, the new conditions of the rough country—even the irony of a fate that had set her at hard, uncongenial toil in the very place where she had sought culture. ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... instantly the image of Emily had recurred to him, and her attitude as she held his little child. To give a step-mother to his children had always been a painful thought. They might be snubbed, misrepresented to him, uncherished, unloved. But Emily! there was the tender grace of motherhood in her every action towards a little child; her yearning sense of loss found its best appeasement in the pretty exactions and artless dependence of small young creatures. No; Emily might spoil step-children if she had them, but she ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... function, and, moreover, it is a function which it is unwise not to exercise; for it is infinitely more perilous for a healthy woman not to be a mother than it is for her to bear children. Motherhood, too, is the most markedly indicated function of a woman's body. She is specialized for it; it is the thing indicated. And yet we never say to a woman, Be a mother when you will; we hold up our hands in horror at the very thought of motherhood itself, and we say, Marry; marry anything; ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... always ill interpreted. One said she was deformed; another suggested some hidden fault; but the poor girl was really as pure as a saint, as healthy as an infant, and full of loving kindness; Nature had intended her for all the pleasures, all the joys, and all the fatigues of motherhood. ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... where a boy of four years was tossing. Her hazel eyes were full of kindly light, the whole face eloquent with that patient, limitless tenderness, which is the magic chrism of maternity, wherewith Lucina and Cuba abundantly anoint Motherhood. The blessed and infallible nepenthe for all childhood's ills and aches, mother touch, mother songs, soon held soothing sway; and when the woman laid the sleeping babe on her own bed, and covered her with a shawl, she ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... attraction, seen from a distance, and one of the sweetest stories in the world is associated with it. For it was there that the young bride Mary visited her older cousin Elizabeth,—you remember the exquisite picture of the "Visitation" by Albertinelli in the Uffizi at Florence,—and the joy of coming motherhood in these two women's hearts spoke from each to each like a bell and its echo. Would the birth of Jesus, the character of Jesus, have been possible unless there had been the virginal and expectant soul ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... with the great deep breath of a vow, as strong as it was silent and undefined, that he should not have come to her in vain. Silent-footed as a beast of prey, silent-handed as a thief, lithe in her movements, her eye flashing with the new-kindled instinct of motherhood to the orphan of her father, it was as if her soul had been suddenly raised to a white heat, which rendered her body elastic ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... irony of fate, it happens that these are often the noblest of their sex. Yet another small section remain single from an honest dislike of marriage and its duties. It is perhaps not too severe to say that a woman who has absolutely no vocation for wifehood and motherhood must be a degenerate, and so lacking in the best feminine instincts as to deserve the reproach of being 'sexless.' This type is apparently increasing! I shall deal with ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... upward step from sheer wage-slavery; the first advance toward the ideal of that coming woman, who should be a man in her freedom and her strength and her power, and yet woman of woman in her love and her motherhood and wife-hood. Industry, so Sally knew, was taking the young girls by the million, overworking them, sapping them of body and soul, and casting them out unfit to bear children, untrained to keep house, undisciplined to meet life and to be a comrade of a man. And Sally knew, moreover, what ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... floated between me and my troubled thoughts of Nancy—a word which means the changing of baser metal into pure gold, the returning of the balance to nature, the fine adjustment of spirit to mind and body—the great word Motherhood. Nancy as a mother. My Little Flower with a floweret of her own might be the solution of a happy marriage for her more than compensating for the independence and adulation which she had ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... mystic Julian, the anchoress of Norwich (c. 1400), insists on the motherhood as well as the fatherhood of God. "God is our mother, brother and Saviour." "As verily God is our father, so verily ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... doings, of His refusals to say or do.—I took the story from the beginning, and told them about the Baby; trying to make the fathers and mothers, and all whose love for children supplied the lack of fatherhood and motherhood, feel that it was a real baby-boy. And I followed the life on and on, trying to show them how He felt, as far as one might dare to touch such sacred things, when He did so and so, or said so and so; and what His relation to His father and mother and brothers and sisters was, and to the different ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... beneath which the little one slept for ever. And Madame de Ruth had laid the blossom tenderly between the Bible's pages, and now, after long years of forgetful gaiety and dissipation, the yearning, unsatisfied motherhood welled up in her heart and ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... careful that he might taste only the joy. So far, amid their spare living, the child, as if looking up to the warm broad wing of her love above him, seemed replete with comfort. Yet in his moments of childish sickness, the first passing shadows upon the deep joy of her motherhood, she teaches him betimes to soothe [165] or cheat pain— little bodily pains only, hitherto. She ventures sadly to assure him of the harsh necessities of life: "Courage, child! Every one must take his share of suffering. Shift not thy body so vehemently. ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... Divergent Social Position. Shall We Return to Polygamy? All Children Entitled to Best Development Possible. The Work of the Children's Bureau. The Suggested Uniform Laws. Have Unmarried Women a Social Right to Motherhood? Ellen Key's Estimate of Motherhood. Monogamic Marriage Does Not Work Inerrantly. New Demand that Motherhood Have Social Support. The Increasing Tendency of Women Toward Celibate Life. Women Cannot be Forced Back to Compulsory Marriage. A Few Believe ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... heroism is made evident by the career of Antonia Shimerda—of Miss Cather's heroines the most appealing. Antonia exhibits the ordinary instincts of self-preservation hardly at all. She is gentle and confiding; service to others is the very breath of her being. Yet so deep and strong is the current of motherhood which runs in her that it extricates her from the level of mediocrity as passion itself might fail to do. Goodness, so often negative and annoying, amounts in her to an heroic effluence which imparts ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... inevitable comeliness of motherhood, opens to you. And nestling in her arms is a little boy with golden hair and happy face, like one of ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... and also in the newspapers one of the most beautiful women in Paris, you tried everything you could think of to keep admirers from me, and you hit upon the abominable idea of making me spend my life in a constant state of motherhood, until the time should come when I should disgust every man. Oh, do not deny it. I did not understand it for some time, but then I guessed it. You even boasted about it to your sister, who told me of it, for she is fond of me and was ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant |
