Motherhood

“ I wonder if women feel it commonly? It was a desire for motherhood—a curiously vivid and very definite longing—entirely irrespective of him, you understand, although he inspired it. Without loving him or being at all moved toward him, he made me sheerly want to be a mother! Or is it only that men we don't love make us feel motherly? ”

“ It is Mother, and again Mother who is called upon, if we need help, if we need support. The honour of motherhood lies in this, in the calling of her name in deep, sorrowful hours. Why do we not call upon our father—why just our mother? Because we feel from childhood, instinctively that Mother, means a world of love and devotion. ”

“ Did mere motherhood hallow that [Pg 104] 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 a mother in distress or merely embarrassment instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? ”

“ The task fairly staggers us with its greatness and its limitless scope; but let us be big enough to look even beyond all this, and, with the glorious capacity for motherhood that lies in every good woman’s breast, let us see not only the millions of homes that are in darkness and sorrow and degradation today, but also realize that the children of today are to be the fathers and mothers of tomorrow. ”

“ Already, by the saintly grace of a mother's heart, she was endowing her offspring with all the virtues. The wondrous optics of motherhood revealed beauty, wisdom, good intent, the promise of great things to come, all concentrated in this tabloid form of man. ”

“ She can keep the deep thrilling joy of motherhood far fresher in her heart, far more vivid and open in voice and eyes and tender hands, when the hours of individual work give her mind another channel for her own part of the day. ”

“ And not only in the relief of hunger is the mother active, but she gets to be associated with the relief from wet and irritating clothes, the pleasant bath, and the pleasure of the change of position that babies cry for. Her bosom and her arms become sources of pleasure, and the race has immortalized them as symbolic of motherhood, in song, in story and in myth. ”

“ If these are truly womanly hands, and the nurse has in her a motherly heart, the child may lose little by the change during its first years. Later on, Nature asserts herself and only a mother’s love can satisfy a child’s yearnings.
On this subject of motherhood, as in all that you and I, my dear girl friends, have talked about together, we need to look into the Book of books for light and guidance.
Motherhood is part of Nature’s—or should I not rather say of God’s—plan for womanhood. ”

“ How hellish the times in which any dares to point the finger of scorn and shame at a blessed pregnant woman. But as we are beginning to understand, soon shall we be able to reverence them all as the sacredness of motherhood is understood. ”

“ The radiance of the highest form of motherhood is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed by suffering comprehended and endured, transmuted into a service beyond and above the lower desires of self.
For long, indeed for the many millions of years during which she has shown a motherhood comparable with that of human beings, [2] Nature has essentially trapped and tricked the mother into her motherhood. ”

“ On the other hand, when maternity is accepted as a privilege, and love instead of bitterness reigns in the prospective mother’s heart, the babe is born tranquil, normal, healthy. Returning to the phrase, efficiency in motherhood, it is good business to bear normal children.
In this day, the woman who frets, rebels and weeps during pregnancy commands little sympathy and practical help from her husband and family. ”

“ Little by little the usefulness of the mother was prolonged, the brooding mother, the feeding mother, lastly the nursing mother, highest of all. Order mammalia stands at the top, type of efficient motherhood.
When human development began, new paths were open to mother-love—new tasks to maternal energy. The human mother not only nursed and guarded the child, but exercised her dawning ingenuity in adding to its comfort by making things. ”

“ Two outstanding facts make the experience of motherhood in non-Christian lands a time of almost intolerable anguish, both physical and mental. The first of these facts is the absence of skilful, intelligent care previous to and during childbirth, and the second is the presence of innumerable superstitions that envelop the mother and her little one and the whole household. ”

“ It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment. ”

“ It has remained for Mary L. Read, with splendid devotion and university training, to put these matters together and to organize and conduct a “School for Mothercraft.”
The time is coming when women will no more go into physical and spiritual motherhood unprepared, trusting to “mother instinct”, than they will go into law or medicine, trusting to their sense of right and of sympathy with the sick to guide them. ”

“ The fundamental function of woman being motherhood, this with its secondary manifestations explains much of her behavior. The devotion of the young girl to the cadet who enslaves her reveals the same instinct which holds a wife faithful through difficulties and degradation,—the instinct from which have developed the virtues of loyalty, endurance and self-sacrifice. The period of pregnancy should be (if the imagination be not filled with old wives’ tales) one of health, exhilaration, development of psychic values and social consciousness. ”

“ We are beginning to realize that one “born mother” in a thousand is not enough to leaven the maternal mass. And out of this discovery has risen a demand, which comes largely from women themselves, for education in motherhood, practical, sincere preparation for woman’s exclusive profession. ”

“ Sooner or later the mother-soul yearns and cries out for the touch of baby fingers, and for that maternal joy that comes to a woman when she clasps to her breast the precious form of her own babe.
MOTHERHOOD THE HIGHEST CALLING
Motherhood is by far woman's highest and noblest profession. Science, art, and careers dwindle into insignificance when we attempt to compare them with motherhood. ”

“ Reproduction is not everything; the men and women who have striven to shorten the hours of child-labour have often been possessed of a keener sense of responsibility and tenderness, a keener sense of fatherhood and motherhood, than the parents whose children they sought to protect. ”

“ This book, therefore, is a plea not only for Motherhood but for Foster-Motherhood—that is, Motherhood all-but-physical. In time to come the great professions of nursing and teaching will more19 and more engage and satisfy the lives and the powers of Virgin-Mothers without number. Let no woman prove herself so ignorant or contemptuous of great things as to suggest that these are functions beneath the dignity of her complete womanhood. ”

“ No other woman in the world can take her place. Many mothers farm their children out to nurses, and then give themselves to household duties, social pleasures, or possibly to duties which may be important in themselves, but which, after all, can only be secondary to the discharge of the all-important duties of motherhood. ”

“ As things are to-day among British stock, [3] it is the very exceptional women who find birth an entirely easy process of which the pain is trivial, and this is chiefly due to the bony structure fixed and limited in size, which stands as a gateway of pain between the infant and the outer world, between the young wife and her motherhood. ”

“ Had there been a Papist 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. ”

“ Charity, till then, had been conscious only of a vague self-disgust and a frightening physical distress; now, of a sudden, there came to her the grave surprise of motherhood. ”

“ Child Culture; or, The Science of Motherhood. By Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, 3rd edition, 16mo, decorated boards, 30 cents.
“We have read nothing from the pen of this gifted woman which we have more enjoyed than this wisely-written booklet, as spiritual as it is practical, and as full of common sense as of exalted sentiment. Any mother having prayerfully read this heart message of a true woman will be a better mother.”—Cumberland Presbyterian. ”

“ Some of them will even admit that purely physical motherhood, so far as the mother's breasts are concerned, cannot wisely be dispensed with. The psychical aspects of motherhood, however, many of these writers—I do not call them thinkers—ignore. ”

“ Morality and its victim, the mother—what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood? ”

“ But the Wild is the Wild, and motherhood is motherhood, at all times fiercely protective whether in the Wild or out of it; ”

“ Were marriage to contain all the virtues claimed for it, its crimes against motherhood would exclude it forever from the realm of love.
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
Free love? As if love is anything but free! Man has bought brains, but all the millions in the world have failed to buy love. ”

“ A ray of light pierced the darkness; my heart and soul, my inner self—a self I had never known before—rent the envelope of gloomy suffering, as a flower bursts its sheath at the first warm kiss of the sun, at the moment when the little wretch fastened on my breast and sucked. Not even the sensation of the child's first cry was so exquisite as this. This is the dawn of motherhood, this is the Fiat lux!
Here is happiness, joy ineffable, though it comes not without pangs. Oh! my sweet jealous soul, how you will relish a delight which exists only for ourselves, the child, and God! ”

“ When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race. ”

“ If your nature prompts you to reveal yourself to her in the relation that leads to maternity control yourself, and be sternly true to yourself, to your wife, and your child that may ensue, until, by all other loving and endearing manifestations, you have created in her nature an earnest call for maternity. Then would she joyfully accept of you the germ of a new life, and, for the sake of her husband and her child, consecrate all the energies of her soul to its true development. ”

“ Can maternity be natural when it is undesigned by the father or undesired by the mother? Can a maternity be natural, healthful, ennobling to the mother, to the child, to the father, and to the home, when no loving, tender, anxious forethought presides over the relation in which it originated?—when the mother's nature loathed and repelled it, and the father's only thought was his own selfish gratification; the feelings and conditions of the mother, and the health, character and destiny of the child that may result being ignored by him. ”

“ There cultivate your intellectual powers together by reading, and by conversation,—especially, on all subjects pertaining to parentage and the ante-natal, as well as the post-natal, development, education and life of your children. How anxious will every true and loving husband and father be, to unite with his wife and the mother of his children, in the nursery, to impart and to receive all possible light in regard to these matters!
Neither should you ever impose maternity on your wife at the expense of her social nature. ”

“ How beautiful, then, in its adaptation to the situation in which she is placed, and the duties she has to perform, is that instinct of maternal love, which, from its intensity and depth, its all-pervading and inextinguishable vitality, so lives and breathes through every act, thought, word, and look of the fond mother, that sooner would her infant doubt its own existence, than question that of her untiring love! ”

“ We speak of nothing anterior to the time when our earth assumed the dignity of maternity, and brought forth its first and only child. We shall trace the development of that child which, though millions of years old, is still in dependence on its parent. We shall describe the influence of the parent over the child, and the not less remarkable reaction of the child upon the parent. We shall foreshadow the destiny which still awaits the mother and child when millions of years shall have elapsed. ”

“ Let us contemplate at our leisure this delightful image of the maternal reverie—of that second childbirth by which she completes the invisible object of her love—the unknown offspring of desire.
A delightful spectacle, but even more sublime than delightful. Let us be modest here. With us the mother loves that which stirs in her bosom—that which she touches, clasps, enfolds in assured possession; she loves the reality, certain, agitated and moving, which responds to her own movements. ”

“ The mother 47cannot feel toward your child, thus originated, as she would had her soul rejoiced in its conception, its development and birth, with a pure, concentrated joy, which such a maternity alone can bring. After the child of an undesired maternity is born, pity for the helpless babe, rather than a rapturous welcome to a longed-for treasure, prompts her to care for it,—though facts demonstrate that a deadly hate in the mother’s heart can pursue the offspring of such a maternity after it is born. ”