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Maternity   Listen
noun
Maternity  n.  
1.
The state of being a mother; motherhood.
2.
The character of a mother; maternal quality; motherliness.
3.
The maternity ward; the maternity department of a hospital.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Maternity" Quotes from Famous Books



... the tenderness for offspring, 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 ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... simplicity, intensely dear to her. In the playtime of her childhood, in the courtship of her youth, in the joys and woes of her wifehood and widowhood, the bitter pains and sweet ecstasies of her maternity, the hunger and privation of struggling desolate years, the contentment and serenity of old age—in all these her eyes had rested only on this small, quaint, leafy street, with its dwellings close and low, like bee-hives in a garden, and its pasture-lands and corn-lands, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... was her quick eye that discerned something wrong. Christine was not quite happy. Under her excitement was an undercurrent of reserve. Anna, rich in maternity if in nothing else, felt it, and in reply to some speech of Christine's that struck her as hard, not quite fitting, she gave her a ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... shields by the natives, elaborately ornamented and much prized. The horn, however, is the most coveted acquisition. It is believed to have peculiar virtues, and is popularly supposed by its mere presence in a house to mitigate the pains of maternity. A rhinoceros horn is often handed down from generation to generation as a heirloom, and when a birth is about to take place the anxious husband often gets a loan of the precious treasure, after which he has no fears for the safe issue ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... a woman, as a representative of humanity, is the same as that of a man; namely, the perfect development of her being in the knowledge of truth, and in the practice of virtue and piety. Her peculiar destiny is wifehood and maternity. But if she declines this peculiar destiny of her sex, or it is denied her, still her common human destiny remains unforfeited; and she has as clear a right to the unrestricted use of every means of fulfilling it as she could have ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... The trembling soul was not to go out alone before, becoming a part of the great current of maternity, it had had the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... dealing with the opening mind of childhood. The intervening years have been passed in practising music, in fancy work, in novel-reading, and in party-going; no thought having been yet given to the grave responsibilities of maternity. And now see her with an unfolding human character committed to her charge,—see her profoundly ignorant of the phenomena with which she has to deal, undertaking to do that which can be done but imperfectly even with the aid of the profoundest knowledge.... ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz

... women's 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 ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)

... the hen seems to broaden with the duties of maternity, but I think myself that we presume a little upon her amiability and natural motherliness. It is one thing to desire a family of one's own, to lay eggs with that idea in view, to sit upon them three long weeks and hatch out and bring up a nice ...
— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... audience of strangers with words of unblushing directness. How men and women may continue pure in the constant hearing and repetition of such revolting arguments and articles of faith is matter of serious question. The divine instincts of maternity, the sweet attractions of human love, were thrown down and stamped under foot in the mud of this man's mind; and at each peroration, exhorting his hearers to shake off Satan, a strong convulsive shiver ran through ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... some women who love children and who will even risk social honor for maternity. There are other women who hate motherhood and who will constantly risk suicide rather than permit it. Mrs. Hatton belongs ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... explaining this design, Euripides, who seeks always for pathetic effect, tells in few words, touching because simple, the story of Semele—here, and again still more intensely in the chorus which follows—the merely human sentiment of maternity being not forgotten, even amid the thought of the divine embraces of her fiery bed-fellow. It is out of tenderness for her that the son's divinity is to be revealed. A yearning affection, the affection with which we ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... now passed since the Spanish and Portuguese peoples of the New World had achieved their independence. Eighteen political children of various sizes and stages of advancement, or backwardness, were born of Spain in America, and one acknowledged the maternity of Portugal. Big Brazil has always maintained the happiest relations with the little mother in Europe, who still watches with pride the growth of her strapping youngster. Between Spain and her descendants, however, animosity endured for many years after they had thrown off the ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd

... that we know what is manly, only when women have the same equality of development and the same liberty of choice as men. The amendment I offer is merely a prayer that you will remove from women a disability, and secure to them the same freedom of choice that we enjoy. If the instincts of sex, of maternity, of domesticity, are not persuasive enough to keep them in the truest sense women, it is the most serious defect yet discovered in the divine order of nature. When, therefore, the Committee declare that voting is at war with the distribution ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... 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 of a new ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... of morphine as the physicians do, yet there are more cases of morphine habit among physicians than among any less informed profession. It is, of course, easy to make young children familiar with the facts of maternity and birth. Compared to the ordinary methods of concealment and lying by parents to children about these matters this is doubtless an improvement, but it does almost nothing to meet the moral problems of sex which come up later in the child's ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... the Count, an old nobleman of aristocratic bearing, endeavored to accentuate by the artifices of his toilette his natural resemblance to King Henry IV, who, according to a legend, in which the family gloried, had caused the maternity of a de Brville lady whose husband, on account of his royal connection, had been made a Count and Governor ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant

... maternity ward. They have three babies still alive upstairs. We get all the newborn in this town, or didn't you know. Funny, isn't it, how we still try to reproduce. They're rigging a smoke chamber for the kids. The head nurse is screaming like a wounded tiger, but she'll feel better with live babies ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone

... 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 protective work ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... could I 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 ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith

... would not have confused the mortal frenzy of maternal terror, with various development of maternal character. Fear, rage, and agony, at their utmost pitch, sweep away all character: humanity itself would be lost in maternity, the woman would become the mere personification of animal fury or fear. For this reason all the ordinary representations of this subject are, I think, false and cold: the artist has not heard the shrieks, nor mingled with ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... its fusion threatened, ever makes a supreme effort for reunity. In the days that followed, Stefan enthusiastically sought to rebuild his image of Mary round the central fact of her maternity. He became inspired with the idea of painting her as a Madonna, and recalled all the famous artists of the past who had so glorified their ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... to assume. They had been married something like three years, and Mary was the delighted mother of a healthy and lovely daughter. Her heart, which had almost closed in the chilly atmosphere of her husband's manners, expanded and flowered luxuriantly in the warmth of maternity. In her happiness she reflected a part of its exuberance on her husband, and smiled with much of her old gayety. 'I felt my young days coming ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... Their joy is flying away 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. ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell

... breast, and she, whose inmost nature was maternity, delighted in the pressure of the tiny body, crooning songs to him when they were left alone, and pausing now and then to pity and kiss the little shrunken foot that hung ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... up with an expression of worldly interest. Dr. Duchesne had brought her two children into the world with some difficulty, and had skillfully attended her through a long illness consequent upon the inefficient maternity of soulful but fragile American women of her type. The doctor had more than a mere local reputation as a surgeon, and Mrs. Rivers looked up to him as her sole connecting link with a world of thought beyond ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... of pleasure and frolic—of dissipation, if you will—that after her marriage she, comparatively speaking, retired from the world, not through any conventional rule or imaginary standard of propriety, but of her own free will, and in the natural course of things; because the cares of maternity and her household gave her sufficient employment at home. A woman who takes a proper interest in her family gives them the first place in her thoughts, and is always ready to talk about them. Now these domestic details are the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... 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, ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... about this time I was frequently called out at all hours of the night for the maternity cases which a fourth-year student takes at a certain period of his studies, and on returning from one of these visits at about two o'clock in the morning I was surprised to hear the sound of voices as I passed his door. A peculiar sweet odour, too, not unlike ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... brought distress upon 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; ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... chairman. The resolutions adopted covered: 1. The endorsement of the Sheppard-Towner Bill for the Public Protection of Maternity and Infancy; (2) of the principle of a bill for physical education about to be introduced into Congress to be administered by the Bureau of Education of the Department of the Interior; (3) of an appropriation ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... with ants, the sufferer has to fast day and night so long as she remains slung up on high in her hammock, so that when she comes down she is reduced to a skeleton. The intention of stinging her with ants is said to be to make her strong to bear the burden of maternity.[144] Amongst the Uaupes of Brazil a girl at puberty is secluded in the house for a month, and allowed only a small quantity of bread and water. Then she is taken out into the midst of her relations and friends, each ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... Soldiers' Families Association, patrol work in the neighborhood of soldiers' training camps, Red Cross work, conducting French classes for our men in training. A very large number of our societies concentrated on maternity and child welfare work; others in country districts took up fruit picking and preserving in order to conserve the national food supplies. It is really impossible to mention all our various activities. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... that the most important feature in a woman's history is her maternity. It is so; but the object of the present observation is the social, and not the ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... 'No, nor he ain't been 'ome.' After a while I gathered that Jack had disappeared in darkness from my house on the night when I put the last touch to my picture, and had not been seen by his mother since. She now began to soften and to cry, and I observed that maternity was in her as well as cheap gin. I endeavoured to comfort her and promised that little Jack should ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... said the Blessed Virgin is not the Mother of the Divinity. She had not, and she could not have, any part in the generation of the Word of God, for that generation is eternal; her maternity is temporal. He is her Creator; she is His creature. Style her, if you will, the Mother of the man Jesus or even of the human nature of the Son of God, but not the Mother ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons

... wind, break buds open and 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 ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts

... 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

... of pain, and 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 ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt

... the breasts of the earth, and drink in all that is most profound and sacred in our people, and all its love from the family and the soil. In the greatest age of liberty, among the people with the most ardent worship of beauty, the young Prince of the Italian Renaissance, Raphael, glorified maternity in his transteverine Madonnas. Who is there now to give us in music a Madonna a la Chaise? Who is there to give us music meet for every hour of life? You have nothing, you have nothing in France. When you want to give your people songs, you are reduced to bringing ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... not an excessive modesty, without warrant in philosophy or nature, dwindling us in this country, drying us up in the viscera? Is there not a decay—a deliberate, strange abnegation and dread—of sane sexuality, of maternity and paternity, among us, and in our literary ideals and social types of men and women? For myself, I welcome any evidence to the contrary, or any evidence that deeper and counteracting agencies are at work, as unspeakably precious. I do not know where this evidence ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... she gave 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

... been an adult moment until that day when Lulu had not instinctively taken the part of the parents, of all parents. Now she saw Dwight's cruelty to her as his cruelty to Di; she saw Ina, herself a child in maternity, as ignorant of how to deal with the moment as was Dwight. She saw Di's falseness partly parented by these parents. She burned at the enormity of Dwight's appeal to her for verification. She threw up her head and no one had ever seen Lulu ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale

... manifestations. And as all the gods were in reality only different names and forms of the Supreme and Unfathomable ONE, so all the goddesses represent only BELIT, the great feminine principle of nature—productiveness, maternity, tenderness—also contained, like everything else, in that ONE, and emanating from it in endless succession. Hence it comes that the goddesses of the Chaldeo-Babylonian religion, though different in name and apparently in attributions, become wonderfully alike ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... domesticity—no jest—no anxiety—no expectation—no variety of action or of thought. Love, all fulfilling, and various modes of power, are alone expressed; the Virgin never shows the complacency or petty watchfulness of maternity; she sits serene, supporting the child whom she ever looks upon, as a stranger among strangers; "Behold the handmaid of the Lord" ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... words, 'My sweet angel, I am going out.' Finally, I have taken measures for the future to make my wife as truly a prisoner in the house as the conscript in his sentry box! For I have inspired her with an incredible enthusiasm for the sacred duties of maternity." ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... 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

... 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 ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... of many-peaked cloud—the gleaming, wandering Alps of the blue ether; outstretched far below, the warming bosom of the earth, throbbing with the hope of maternity. Two spirits abroad in the air, encountering each other and passing into one: the spirit of scentless spring left by melting snows and the spirit of scented summer born with the earliest buds. The road through the forest one of those wagon-tracks that were being opened from ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen

... 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 ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... 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 avail themselves ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg

... few of them with antique European black bonnets and clothes; and in their withered old faces you could imagine a strain of the early Portuguese settlers. The altar was, as usual, in colours to suit the simple mind; the Madonna in blue and white and gold with a sweet expression of youth and maternity, her cheeks were like china, and she dandled the sweetest little red-haired baby in a nest of gold rays, all against a rocky background. How telling the fair Viking type of baby must be to these little black-eyed, wondering ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... have possessed 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 on the occasion, were angered by a notoriety which was becoming uncomfortable ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins

... 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 fit to exercise this high function in the state because of motherhood. ...
— 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.

... the fact, she was filled with immeasurable joy, a joy that overflowed her heart. Her happiness was so great and so overpowering that it stifled at a single stroke the anguish, the fear, the inward trembling that ordinarily disturb the maternity of unmarried women and poisons their anticipations of childbirth, the divine hope that lives and moves within them. The thought of the scandal caused by the discovery of her liaison, of the outcry in the quarter, the idea of the abominable ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... gravest of possible results to herself—the embodiment of power and weakness, capacity or incapacity, worth or worthlessness in her own offspring, she is forbidden all acquaintance. Yet when she assumes the duties and responsibilities of maternity, such knowledge would be more valuable to her and to those dearest to her, than all of the treasures of the gold-bearing lands, if poured ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... identified. And in fact, though in historical origin the two deities are to be kept apart, they doubtless go back to the same conception. The Ephesian goddess was the Great Mother—she stood specifically for the idea of maternity which lies at the basis of the world; the Greek divinity, beginning as a local protectress, took on larger functions which gave her general resemblance ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... under-population has long constituted a tragedy. In 1903 and 1904 the "Ligue de la 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 Grand Orient, in whose Temples, Monsieur Copin Albancelli points out, the principle of "la ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... instance, a kind of Rake's Progress or "How she became a Communist," in which the Entente leaders 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 of Communist doctrine. These pictures have, too, ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell

... and broad, bespoke gracious womanhood and a possible radiant maternity, rather than intellectuality. The masses of hair were braided and wound coronet-style about the small uplifted head. The eyes, deep, dark, and mystical gave no clue to the inner woman; but the mouth, while ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... thousand and 95 percent had physicians, while in Montana 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

... born, Nea's heart, softened by the joys of maternity, yearned passionately for a reconciliation, and by her husband's advice, she stifled all feelings of resentment, and wrote as she had never written before, as she never could write again, but all in vain; the letter was returned, ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... length and with some plainness on what is, for I really do not know what reason, the most delicate of subjects. Seeing in that one of the most serious and interesting parts of life, he was aggrieved that it should be looked upon as ridiculous or shameful. No one speaks of maternity with his tongue in his cheek; and Whitman made a bold push to set the sanctity of fatherhood beside the sanctity of motherhood, and introduce this also among the things that can be spoken of without either a blush or a wink. But the Philistines have been ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... others, so far as that duty lies in the sphere of her Physical Life, whether she is called upon to act as Wife, Mother, Teacher, or Guide. His most ardent desire continues to be that the work will be found a sure and safe monitor amid the difficult duties of Maidenhood and Maternity. ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... 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 ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas

... the trail made by his seven-league boots during the last thirty-five years of his career; but as I listened I found myself wondering that I had not noticed before that his modernity had begun before I had commenced to realize even what maternity meant—more than half a century ago, for "La Traviata" was composed in 1853. The quivering atmosphere of Violetta's sick-room seemed almost visible as the pathetic bit of hymnlike music rose upward from the divided viols of the orchestra ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... Hellenic calm of Parnassus is not more impressive than the splendid charge of the avenging spirits upon Heliodorus; the visionary idealism of the angel-led Peter is matched by the vigorous realism of Peter called from his fishing to the apostleship; the brooding quiet of maternity expressed in the Madonna of the Chair has a perfect complement in the alert activity of the ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... revealed to the Prince when the Princess made him aware that a new soul had been entrusted to their tender care and keeping. The thoughts of maternity filled her heart with bliss. Blessed privilege, to bring to this plane of existence a soul awaiting incarnation in human form, to live, grow and experience on this planet the last grand objective existence that the soul can know. What care, what pleasure would she ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner

... thoroughly perplexed. She sways her head, passes her front tarsi through her mandibles, then moves away and climbs to the top of the dome without attempting anything. In each of these three cases I have to finish filling in the pit myself. What then are this maternity, which the touch of a brush causes to forget its duties, and this memory, which is lost at a distance of an inch from the spot? Compare with these shortcomings of the adult the expert machinations of the primary larva, ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... Junior Sea Breeze and 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 ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... and the established order of society founded upon it. We do not intend to go into any physiological argument. There is one broad striking fact in the constitution of the human species which ought to set the question at rest for ever. This is the fact of maternity.... From this there arise, in the first place, physical impediments which, during the best part of the female life, are absolutely insurmountable, except at a sacrifice of almost everything that distinguishes the civilized human from the animal, or beastly, and savage state. As a ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker

... Chief Justice Chase or Attorney General Hoar or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate. Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams astonished himself by remarking what a purified ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... Clara remarked. "Well, we'll see next spring." Clara had not been happy at the prospect of her first maternity, but she was jubilant over ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... and her aspect is human and spirited,—almost merry. It may be said to be less religious than the other statue, but it is filled with more modern grace and charm, and glorifies the idea of happy maternity: every angle and fold of the drapery is full of life and action without being over realistic. There is much in common between this pleasing statue and the Virgins of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... 'Mid all the daughters of our race Peerless in beauty and in grace. More blest than if in wifehood's pride Thou stood'st at some young warrior's side, Or with fair children round thy knee Didst crown thy young maternity! ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

... more plainly, so that it definitely assumed life, with lines and hues from which the child, in her after-descriptions, never departed. The lady's eyes were blue and very mild, her mouth was rosy and smiling, the oval of her face expressed both the grace of youth and of maternity. Below the veil covering her head and falling to her heels, only a glimpse was caught of her admirable fair hair, which was slightly curled. Her robe, which was of dazzling whiteness, must have been of some material unknown ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... according to the forcible expression of St. Peter, when he asserts that we are "made partakers of the divine nature."* This is the highest glory to which a rational nature can be elevated, if we except the glory of the hypostatic union and the maternity of the ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux

... the mother of El Mahdi. I remember how Ump cried when the colt was born, and how he sat out in the rain, a miserable drenched rat, because his dear Bay Eagle was in the mysterious troubles of maternity, and because she must be very unhappy at being on the north side of the hill among the black hawthorn bushes, for that was a bad sign—the worst sign in the world—showing the devil would have his day with the ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post

... 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 ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... become rich, and yet his riches could not remove a particle of the maternal complexion from those who were to inherit the name and wealth of the old trader. If they should marry other half-breeds, the line of dusky Perritauts might stretch out the memory of a savage maternity to the crack of doom. Que voulez-vous? They must not many half-breeds. Each generation must make advancement toward a Caucasian whiteness, in a geometric ratio, until the Indian element should be reduced by an infinite progression toward nothing. But how? It did not take long ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... buzz insults at each other. Then they go back and alight on the nest in dispute, first one, then the other. I expect to see them come to blows, to make them draw their stings. But my hopes are disappointed: the duties of maternity speak in too imperious a voice for them to risk their lives and wipe out the insult in a mortal duel. The whole thing is confined to hostile demonstrations ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... 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 ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... protesting, at least unconvinced. We might accept the heroine herself as an incarnate spirit of cruel curiosity, inflicting purposeless pain, and to be explained, even if not to be justified, only by her impending maternity,—which she recoils from and is unworthy of. But I, for one, cannot help finding Hedda inconsistent artistically, as tho she was a composite photograph of irreconcilable figures. For example, she shrinks from scandal, yet she burns Eilert's manuscript, she gives him one of her pistols, ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... wretched girl—for she was scarcely yet a woman, although were life spared her, on the way to maternity—was thus fruitlessly imploring the mercy of hearts that were stern and remorseless, the hymn continued, and the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... 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 ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various

... institution in Bontoc Igorot society. The purpose of the o'-lag is as far from enforcing chastity as it well can be. The old women never frequent the o'-lag, and the lesson the girls learn there is the necessity for maternity, not the "industries of their sex" — which children of very primitive people acquire quite as a young fowl learns to ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... peculiar but not unprecedented case of collapse of memory, caused by overwork; and had spent most of the consultation time in condemning the higher education of women. Time, rest, and the fulfilment of woman's proper function of maternity would, he affirmed, bring all right, since there was no sign of disease in Mrs. Stewart, who appeared to him, on the contrary, a perfectly healthy young woman. When Ian, alone with him, began tentatively to ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... long as the seals' carcasses were lying on the slope, they stayed there; afterwards they found another place. But the tent, despised by the youngsters, came in useful after all. Any bitch that was going to have a litter was put in there, and the tent went by the name of "the maternity hospital." Then one tent after another was put up, and Framheim looked quite an important place. Eight of the sixteen-man tents were set up for our eight teams, two for dried fish, one for fresh meat, one for cases of provisions, and one for ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... as remarkable for her microscopic piety as for the beauty untarnished by a copious maternity, figured in the child's memories as a stout saint who moved with a rustle of silken skirts and heaved an opulent black silk bosom relieved ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... not belong to the jurisdiction of a court, 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 its political rights or as parens patriae to protect ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin

... her down into their torment.—Unfortunate one.—That presage of her maternity echoed in her now. His stern young face seemed to have been framed, destined from the ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... 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, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... They have no 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 without ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... 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 ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... child?—he was so much older than she! Life to her was an hourly pain—you see she was wild with indignation and shame, and alive with a kind of gratitude and reaction when she married him. And her life? Maternity was to her an agony such as comes to few women who suffer and live. If her child—her beautiful, noble child—had lived, she would, perhaps, one day have claimed the property for its sake. This child was her second love ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker

... dim raw-material of a thought, was fermenting all night, universally in the female head, and might explode. In squalid garret, on Monday morning, Maternity awakes, to hear children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets, to the herb-markets and Bakers'—queues; meets there with hunger-stricken Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we unhappy women! But, instead of Bakers'-queues, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... an anxiety he would scarcely confess to himself, and sometimes hold him aimlessly a whole day beneath his roof. For the pretty but delicate Mrs. Harcourt, like others of her class, had added a weak and ineffective maternity to their other conjugal trials, and one early dawn a baby was born that lingered with them scarcely longer than the morning mist and exhaled with the rising sun. The young wife regained her strength slowly,—so slowly that the youthful husband brought ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... the ribs, and kneeling down in the bloody pool washed his whole body with the blood and excretions of the animal, while he prayed to the soul of the hippopotamus not to bear him a grudge for having killed her and so blighted her hopes of future maternity; and he further entreated the ghost not to stir up other hippopotamuses to avenge her death by butting at ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... 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 ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... resemblance to their reputed father. The other children were dolls of different ages, sex, and condition, but the twins may be said to have been distinctly her own conception. Yet such was her admirable and impartial maternity that she never made any difference between them. "The Amplach's children" was a ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... her motherhood colored her whole life. Never a baby was born among her poor neighbors in the valley that she did not thrill with a keen delight at its coming, and welcome it with some small material token of her joy. In the baby she lived over again her own first days of maternity. But it was no play motherhood that restored her soul and refilled her receptacle of faith day by day. The bodily, huggable presence of her daughter continually unfolding some new beauty kept her eager for the day's work to close in the Valley that she might go home to drop ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... of the outer 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

... restrictive immigration, through requiring safety devices for the prevention of accidents, through the granting of workman's compensation, through civilian vocational rehabilitation and education, through employment information bureaus, and through such humanitarian relief as was provided in the maternity and infancy legislation. It is a satisfaction to report that a more general condition of contentment exists among wage earners and the country is more free from labor disputes than it has been for years. While restrictive immigration ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... and specialisation; and while the tasks demanding the more sustained physical exertions were left to man, and to the performance of which his sexual nature offered no impediment, woman became more and more specialised for maternity and domestic occupations. This, I hasten to add, is not at all intended as a plea for denying to women the right to participate in the wider social life of the species. I am trying to explain a social phase, and neither justifying nor ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen

... in the mirror gravely every night after she had done her hair in the prescribed pig-tails to try to determine whether or not the look he had discovered in her face was still there,—the look of implicit maternity that she had been fortunate enough to reflect and symbolize for him,—but she was unable to come to any decision about it. Her face looked to her much as it had always looked—except that her brow and ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... luxury. Wide cottages occupied velvet- green lawns, and the women he saw were of the sort he approved—closely skirted creatures with smooth shoulders in transparent crepe de Chine. They invited a contemplative eye, the thing for which they were created—a pleasure for men; that and maternity. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... who say that none but humankind is immortal,—that none but man has a soul. I do not make or believe that claim. There is that within me which tells me that no thing in this world and life of ours which has felt the grace of maternity shall utterly perish. And this I say in all reverence, and with the hope that I offend neither God ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field

... 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 you to ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... depraved?—to favor the free expansion of all the passions, which God, in His infinite wisdom, and inexhaustible goodness, gave to man as so many powerful levers?—to sanctify all the gifts of Heaven: love, maternity, strength, intelligence, beauty, genius?—to make men truly religious, and deeply grateful to their Creator, by making them understand the splendors of Nature, and bestowing on them their rightful share in the treasures which have been ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... magnificent, and the padres handled it as rapturously as had their souls and fingers been of the sex symbolized while exalted by the essence of maternity, in whose service it would be anointed. Rezanov looked on with an amused sigh, yet conscious of being more comprehending and sympathetic than if he had journeyed straight from Europe to California. It was not the first time he had felt a passing gratitude for his uncomfortable but illuminating ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton

... to save us. Marion had acquired at Smithie's a disgust and dread of maternity. All that was the fruition and quintessence of the "horrid" elements in life, a disgusting thing, a last indignity that overtook unwary women. I doubt indeed a little if children would have saved us; we should have differed so fatally about ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... modern savages, whose customs and beliefs, though known as but of yesterday, are represented to us as older than the Veda, older than Babylonian cylinders, older than anything written. When certain modern savages recognize the relationship of paternity, maternity, and consanguinity, this is called very ancient. If they admit traditional restrictions as to marriage, food, the treatment of the dead, nay, even a life to come, this too, no doubt, may be very old; but it may be of yesterday also. There are even quite ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... he had been conscious of obscure doubts as to her truthfulness, clustering round the suspicion that she might have known, by hearing something, that Dewhurst, the gull-flayer, was on the side of the maternity, and that she wanted to punish him—a notion which seemed to be favoured by the somewhat affected manner of her expressing her little sermon. These doubts, fluid and wavering, became, as it were, crystallized by Dewhurst's cry that she was a liar; and, the moment he felt the sharp angles of the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various

... 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 her and laugh "She's going ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... tactics and is leading us a wild dance through unprofitable deserts. While we have been shattering ethnic images he has been building new idols. While we have been dragging the Phalaris Bull from its pedestal the Golden Calf of ancient Israel has reached maturity and maternity and its progeny is now ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... 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 old house with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... 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 and ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various

... appliances. That is to say, that primary human unit, the home, was altering in shape and size and frequency and colour and effect. A steadily increasing proportion of people were living outside the old family home, the home based on maternity and offspring, altogether. A number of us were doing our best to apprehend the summation of all this flood of change. We had a vague idea that women were somehow being "emancipated," but just what this ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... of 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 of woman's labour ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... Columbario, in a very solitary situation, which was the more agreeable to him from the great attraction he had for contemplation. He had it erected under the title of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, in honor of her Divine maternity; he then returned to St. Mary of ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... drinking we watched with amazement. Even the cathedral seemed to me to breathe the richness and gaiety of this central France; the sculptures of the facade with its famous "laughing angel" expressed rather the joy of living, of fair womanhood, of smiling maternity, and childhood, of the prime of youth and the satisfied dignity of age, than those austerer lessons of Christianity which speak from Beauvais, or Chartres or Rouen. But how beautiful it all was, how ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... knew her, in the flush and bloom of young maternity, her face scarcely differed in its curving outlines from what it was more than a quarter of a century later, when the joys and sorrows of full-orbed womanhood had stamped upon it indelible marks of the perfection they had wrought. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... 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 of her neighbours' deeds, More filled with nerve-ache and rheumatic twinge, More ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... 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 to his noisy and blundering way to accord with each other. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... Yang, who won 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 them ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... was pluming itself for flight. Making his way through this camp of misery, he heard the sobbings of children hungry and sick; there were men and women dying from wounds or disease, without a semblance of shelter or other physical comfort; wives in the pangs of maternity, ushering into the world innocent babes doomed to be motherless from their birth. And at intervals, to the ears of those outcasts, the sick and the dying, the wind brought the soul-piercing sounds of the reveling mob in the distant city, the scrap of vulgar ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage

... have to go back several years—thirteen, to be exact—to start my story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children. Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All the responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended by walking along with the bull on his shoulders. However, I did the best I could. When Gertrude ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... Carolina-moss, and dank with cypress dew; his countenance tawny and shadowy as an iron-ore country in a clouded day. In one hand he carried a heavy walking-stick of swamp-oak; with the other, led a puny girl, walking in moccasins, not improbably his child, but evidently of alien maternity, perhaps Creole, or even Camanche. Her eye would have been large for a woman, and was inky as the pools of falls among mountain-pines. An Indian blanket, orange-hued, and fringed with lead tassel-work, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville

... by this student only as 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... daily exhibition of the Treasury, Gabriel thought the poverty of the Claverias even more revolting and intolerable. The shoemaker seemed sadder and yellower in the rank atmosphere of his den, bending over his bench hammering the soles, his wife more feeble and ill, the miserable slave of maternity, weakened by hunger, and offering to her little son as his only hope of food those flaccid breasts in which there was nothing left but a drop of blood. The little child was dying! Sagrario, who had left her machine to spend the greater part of the day in the shoemaker's room ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... our sense of security in what is 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... woman whose sternness of view had been tempered by neither maternity nor breadth of experience ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... that at Paris the whole neighborhood adjoining the medical school—including patients in a maternity hospital—"were constantly disturbed, when the course of physiology was proceeding at the school, by the howling and barking of the dogs, both night and day." The dogs were silenced. "The fact was, the poor animals were ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... labour which we see performed by the workers has for its end the sustenance and welfare of the young brood, which are helpless grubs. The true females are incapable of attending to the wants of their offspring; and it is on the poor sterile workers, who are denied all the other pleasures of maternity, that the entire care devolves. The workers are also the chief agents in carrying out the different migrations of the colonies, which are of vast importance to the dispersal and consequent prosperity ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... out of a settle in the adjoining room. She could hear him moving about in his preparations; but her mind ran most strongly on Lucetta, whose death in such fulness of life and amid such cheerful hopes of maternity was appallingly unexpected. Presently ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... of love against reason in conflict with love conformable to reason, worked out with all the power of the author's former novel, "The Maternity of Harriot Wicken," but much more inviting in subject, characters, and treatment. A distinct advance on that able work and full of promise for the future of this rising author. Scene, ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells

... observe that he tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market. There are unwanted children; but unwanted by whom? This man does not really mean that the parents do not want to have them. He means that the employers do not want to pay them properly. Doubtless, if you said to ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... girl and a boy living on a desert island, and she has a baby without turning a hair. Remembering my nerve-racking experience of maternity in the Borough I thought Stacpoole was rather talking without his book. But when I saw this Maori I felt like sending him my humble apologies by wireless. The tribe was trekking. I was with them for months, you ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... unfinished character clung to the Widow Hiler and asserted itself in her three children, one of whom was consistently posthumous. Prematurely old and prematurely disappointed, she had all the inexperience of girlhood with the cares of maternity, and kept in her family circle the freshness of an old maid's misogynistic antipathies with a certain guilty and remorseful consciousness of widowhood. She supported the meagre household to which her husband had contributed only ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte

... defect is not always the woman's. In every six childless marriages about one is due to sterility in the husband. The age of the greatest fertility in women is between twenty and twenty-four years. It is rare to find a barren woman between these years. Nature evidently intended that the duties of maternity should be assumed between the twenty and twenty-fourth year. If married before the age of twenty the statistics prove that barrenness exists in one woman in every twelve. If married after the twenty-fourth year the chances of ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... was known as a crackpot. He had a motley crew of technicians and scientists working for him—some with Ph.D.'s, some with a trade-school education. The personnel turnover in that little group was on a par with the turnover of patients in a maternity ward, at least as far as genuine scientists were concerned. Porter concocted theories and hypotheses out of cobwebs and became furious with anyone who tried to tear them down. If evidence came up that would tend to show that one of his pet theories was ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett

... 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 ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... mother; they imply soundness, fertility, a good circulation, a good digestion. Conversely, sallowness and paleness are roughly indicative of dyspepsia and anaemia; a flat chest is a symptom of deficient maternity; and what we call a bad figure is really, in one way or another, an unhealthy departure from the central norma and standard of the race. Good teeth mean good deglutition; a clear eye means an active liver; scrubbiness and undersizedness mean ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... he stood on the fender to see in the mantel-glass whether he could do it himself, and then Mary turned a most candid face on me, in which was maternity rather than reproach. Perhaps no look given by woman to man affects him quite so much. "You see," she said radiantly and with a gesture that disclosed herself to me, "I can forgive even that. You long ago earned the right to hurt me if you ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie

... With undulating long-drawn flow, As tolled Brazilian billows go Voluminously o'er the Line. The Land reposed in peace below; The children in their glee Were folded to the exulting heart Of young Maternity. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... the heap of pockets with the same devotion as a brooding hen. Maternity has not withered her. Although decreased in bulk, she retains an excellent look of health; her round belly and her well-stretched skin tell us from the first that her part is ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... the interest of the state to encourage human multiplication at all, for it is already too powerful and progressive. It is the public interest to check all propagation but that of good citizens, and to protect all women from enforced maternity, whether enforced under legal powers or by the arts ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various

... with the word a yearning and craving for her mother filled every sense. By a magic that the divine only controls, poor Theodora Glenn in that moment was transformed and radiantly crowned with the motherhood she had so impotently striven to achieve in her narrowed, blighted life. The suffering of maternity, its denials and relinquishings she had experienced, but never its joy of realization, unless, as her spirit passed from the Place Beyond the Winds to its Home, it paused beside the little, narrow, white bed upon which Priscilla lay, and ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... way through, 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 with them. It was an anxious, sensitive crowd, Tressady thought, as ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... brought up without vigor or muscular strength, without the least practical experience of household labor, or those means of saving it which come by daily practice; and then, after marriage, when physically weakened by maternity, embarrassed by the care of young children, they are often suddenly deserted by every efficient servant, and the whole machinery of a complicated household left in their weak, inexperienced hands. In the country, you see a household perhaps made void some fine morning ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe



Words linked to "Maternity" :   pregnancy, segmentation, gravidation, extrauterine gestation, lying-in, eccyesis, maternity hospital, gestation, amnio, amniocentesis, childbed, stretch mark, parturiency, motherhood, trouble, travail, gravida, fetal movement, gravidity, morning sickness, physiological condition, metacyesis, maternity ward, venous thrombosis, ectopic gestation, entopic pregnancy, placenta previa, ectopic pregnancy, endometrium, confinement, quickening, family relationship, extrauterine pregnancy, phlebothrombosis, labor, cleavage, parental quality, parity, gravidness, para, maternal quality, maternalism, kinship, labour



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