"Wifehood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... study in emotion during the girl's recital. From terror it passed to indignation, from horror to the shrinking of outraged wifehood. Now she stammered her request for ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... fact—they didn't. How could they? Back in their prehistoric records of polygamy and slavery there were no ideals of wifehood as we know it, and since then no ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... complains of having a wife is, of course, often that he prefers a mistress; but it is equally true that another cause for complaint is that his wife has for him none of the recognized attributes of the normal state of wifehood. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... encouraged by many agencies and persons to take the title of "Mrs.," since that is a conventional term at best and may be given according to age (as in the older custom) or come to attach itself to motherhood as justly as to wifehood. More and more society is reaching out through law and wise philanthropy to fasten mutual responsibility for child-care and nurture upon both parents even where they are not legally married. This movement must go on until the handicap of the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... her Westmoreland life, the first twelve months of wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of rapid and changing experience. A few days out of their honeymoon had been spent at Oxford. It was a week before the opening of the October term, but many of the senior members of the University were already in residence, and the stagnation ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of consequences, she flung open the door and stood on the threshold, breathless and crimson, in all her indignant wifehood. Frederick stood near the chair in which sat Tessibel. In one single moment Madelene sent an appraising glance over the girl huddled in the wooden rocker—a woman's glance, mercilessly discovering her condition. Then her blazing eyes came back to Frederick. He had not ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... the imaginary creature whom she called her dream-husband had gradually taken on his physical likeness. But the idea that she was in any way enamoured of him had never entered her mind; that she could ever be tempted to yield to him, to be false to her ideals of wifehood, was inconceivable. In such wise do ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... could find in pleasant imaginings. As she went about, punctually performing her ineffectual duties, or sat silently sewing, she had been to all outward seeming an example to be revered of graceful wifehood and womanliness; but when one came to know what her inner life had become in consequence of the fatal repression of the best powers of her mind, it was evident that she was in reality a miserable type of a woman wasted. The natural ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... justice making itself heard through her dull soul. It was the instinctive demand for atonement. It was the unconscious appeal for reinstatement to the privileges of wifehood. ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... Then her wifehood rose up in arms as she thought of Ronnie's gay, boyish trust in her; their happy life together; ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... into a face so fair and so full of all fealty and promise of sweet wifehood that he resolved in an instant that if it lay in human power to meet the terms of the old man's challenge the thing should be accomplished. He said as much, and what he said was punctuated labially. Being a professor, it would never have done for ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... had aged in the seven months since her husband's death. She had aged considerably. Her spirit, her courage, were undiminished, but the years had at last levied the toll which a happy wifehood had denied them. Nor was Murray unobservant of these things. His partner in the fortunes of Fort Mowbray was an ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... daily communion with Theodosia, she dwelt not in a white frame house on a woody island of the Ohio River, not in the present; but in the future, and in a marble palace in the splendid domain of Aaron I. The two enthusiastic women, allied in a common cause, inspired alike by the experience of wifehood and maternity, similarly ambitious, passionate and imaginative, reciprocated each other's sentiments ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... eyebrows, as if perturbed by the news. But it was on the young wife that Graham's eyes dwelt longest. She sat with some sewing on the further side of the open fire, and her face was toward him. Had she changed? Yes; but for the better. The slight matronly air and fuller form that had come with wifehood became her better than even her girlish grace. As she glanced up to her husband from time to time, Graham saw serene loving ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... women-workers 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 ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... David that he had not. But somehow she did not, somehow she could not. Somehow Hannah Heath had become a living, breathing enemy to be met and conquered. Marcia felt her fighting blood rising, felt the Schuyler in her coming to the front. However little there was in her wifehood, its name at least was hers. The tale that Miranda had told was enough, if it were true, to put any woman, however young she might be, into battle array. Marcia was puzzling her mind over the question that has been more or less of a weary ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Oh, yes, he would have been good to her—probably he would have worshiped her; but one side of her nature would have been a mystery to him. You must not grieve for her, my child, for she has ceased to grieve for herself; the Divine Providence has withheld from her a woman's natural joys of wifehood and maternity, but a noble work is to be given to her; our Margaret, please God, will be a mother in Israel.' And, indeed, I feel Raby is right, and that Margaret is ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in the girl's heart. He considered it quite natural that she should be a trifle hysterical in anticipating her new life—that strange untraveled country! Ah, is there anything more pathetic, he thought, than a girl's anticipations of wifehood? But he would do his duty, and he fancied that he was doing his duty when he put aside her earnest, almost passionate protestations, and told her how happy she would be with the man who was lucky enough to have won the pure ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... that a genuine woman stood down there among them like a sister, ready with head, heart, and hand to help them help themselves; not offering pity as an alms, but justice as a right. Hardship and sorrow, long effort and late-won reward had been hers they knew; wifehood, motherhood, and widowhood brought her very near to them; and behind her was the background of an earnest life, against which this figure with health on the cheeks, hope in the eyes, courage on the lips, and the ardor of a wide benevolence warming the whole countenance stood out full ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... illuminates, but indistinctly. It beautifies, but it does not vivify or fructify. It comes indeed from the sun, but in too roundabout a way to do the sun's work. So, if a woman is pretty nearly sanctified before she is married, wifehood and motherhood may finish the business; but there is not one man in ten thousand of the writers aforesaid who would marry a vixen, trusting to the sanctifying influences of marriage to tone her down to sweetness. A thoughtful, gentle, pure, and elevated woman, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... want to do what is right in the solemn warning business, so I will give notice to all simple young women who are now self-supporting and happy, that there is no statute requiring them to assume the burdens of wifehood and motherhood unless they prefer to do so. If they now have abundance of pin-money and new clothes, they may remain single if they wish without violating the laws of the land. This rule is also good ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... rebellion, sedition and revolt against slavery, for life and love and freedom! You wonder where I have learned to turn and face this oppression of the world, instead of yielding to it, one more unhappy woman among the thousands that are bought and sold into wifehood every year! I have learned nothing, my heart needed no teaching for that! It is enough that I love an honest man truly—I know that it is wrong to promise my faith to another, and that it is a worse wrong in you to try to get that promise from me by force. A vow that could be ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... shrewish, with dish-shaped faces, inelastic limbs. They had taken the war into their whole strength, like their sisters, North and South: as women greedily do anything that promises to be an outlet for what power of brain, heart, or animal fervor they may have, over what is needed for wifehood or maternity. Theodora, he thought, angrily, looked at the war as these women did, had no poetic enthusiasm about it, did not grasp the grand abstract theory on either side. She would not accept it as a fiery, chivalric cause, as the Abolitionist did, nor as a stern necessity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... undoubtedly indebted to the wise counsel and guidance of the Prince Consort in the early decades of her reign. Not one act of folly has marred its even current. She has held up to the nation a high ideal of wifehood, motherhood, and of domestic virtue. None of her predecessors have bound their people to them with ties so human, her griefs and experiences moving them as their own. We think of her more as an exalted type of Woman, than as Sovereign of the most marvellous Empire the World ever saw;—its area three ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... devotion of these women to their bullies is as remarkable as the brutality of their bullies is abominable. Probably the primary cause of the fall of numberless girls of the lower class, is their great aspiration to the dignity of wifehood;—they are never "somebody" until they are married, and will link themselves to any creature, no matter how debased, in the hope of being ultimately married by him. This consideration, in addition ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... wifehood when she had read in his noble face something of that which he endeavoured to command and which to no other was apparent, the dignity of his self-restraint had but filled her with tenderness more passionate ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and homage were always necessary to her, and in Fabre she found her ideal cavalier. Her salon now became more popular even than in the days of her young wifehood. It drew to it all the greatest men in Europe, men of world-wide fame in statesmanship, letters, and art, all anxious to do homage to a woman of such culture and with such rare ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... with her book and sadly putting into thought a thing she had never more than felt before: that whatever she might wisely or unwisely do with it, she held in her nature a sacred gift of passion; that life, her life, could never bloom in full joy and glory shut out from wifehood and motherhood, and that the idlest self-deceit she could attempt would be to say she need not marry. Suddenly she started and then lay stiller than before. She had found the long-sought explanation of her mother's tardy marriage—neither a controlling nor a controlled ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... it in this light," Phillips argued, after a pause. "Diane is a married woman; she, too, is fighting a battle; she is restrained by every convention, every sense of right, every instinct of wifehood and womanhood. Now, then, you must sweep all that aside; your own fire ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... the program, that you could speak on one subject as well as another;" so they found themselves down for "Educational Influences of Home Life;" "Which Counts More, Father's or Mother's Influence?" "Does Wifehood Preclude Citizenship?" "The Evolution of the Home;" "The Family and the State;" "Shall We Co-operate?" "The Rights of Motherhood;" and numerous other topics. Both spoke every day during the Congress and the people seemed never ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... is full of women who have starved, wasted and shriveled their lives away behind counters, desks and typewriters when they were meant for motherhood and wifehood. ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... not less touching because so far from rare. Born and bred in affluence which emanated from the daily exertions of her father, his death left his widow and three orphan daughters destitute. The eldest early assumed the burdens of wifehood and maternity. Ruth was the second child. A girl of high spirit, she quickly laid aside all false pride, and earnestly sought to earn the bread of those she loved by the labor of her fair young hands, until then strangers to toil. But where was remunerative occupation ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... nonsensical. No, no, my dear fellow, even to 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 ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... many false ideas prevail as to woman's true position in the home as to her status elsewhere. Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations. Governments legislate for men; we do not have one code for bachelors, another for husbands and fathers; neither have the social relations of women any significance in their demands for civil and political rights. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... lead a spaniel by a silken cord? Was she aware that, as she moved side by side with Mrs. Belcher, through the grand rooms, she was displaying herself to the best advantage to her admirer, and that, yoked with the wifehood and motherhood of the house, she was dragging, while he held, the plow that was tilling the deep carpets for tares that might be reaped in harvests of unhappiness? Would she have dropped the chain if she ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... voice, who put the right words in my brain, who made me laugh—yes, laugh, and almost caress him with my hands. The change in me amazed him, stunned him, and he freed me—while I told him that in these first few hours of wifehood I wanted to be alone, and that he should come to me that evening, and that I would be waiting for him. And I smiled at him as I said these things, smiled while I wanted to kill him, and he went, a great, gloating, triumphant beast, believing ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... her back!" he exclaimed. "Give her further opportunity to exercise her brand of wifehood on me and motherhood on ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... whether or not we might legally protect her. Still more strongly we feel it is strange justice which decrees that though a child of twelve may be legally held competent to undertake the responsibilities of wifehood, six years more must pass before she may be legally held free to obey her conscience. Free! She is never legally free! A widow may be legally free; a wife in India, never! Hardly a single Caste wife ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... own monde, could not well realise her ambition simply as a married woman. She would probably marry, play fast and loose with the married state, neglect her children if she had any, and after one or two divorces, die or disappear. So powerfully did this idea of the incompatibility of culture and wifehood gain possession of the Roman mind in the last century B.C., that Augustus found his struggle with it the most difficult task he had to face; in vain he exiled Ovid for publishing a work in which married women are ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... we, of course, expect to see some evidence of it in the appearance of the people. Yet, during the whole day, we found but one clean person—the hostess of an inn on the summit of Fille Fjeld, where we stopped to bait our horses. She was a young fresh-faced woman, in the first year of her wifehood, and her snowy chemise and tidy petticoat made her shine like a star among the dirty and frowzy creatures in the kitchen. I should not forget a boy, who was washing his face in a brook as we passed; but he was young, and didn't know any better. Otherwise the ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... followed the strange man to a strange country. Sometimes the weakness of Japanese women is their greatest strength. This woman knew how to obey. In her way she had learned to love, but her limited capacity for affection was consumed by wifehood. Having married and borne a child to the man who required nothing of her, duty in life so far as she saw it was canceled. Further effort on her part was unnecessary until the time for her to ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... that their morality in wifehood is all sufficient. A woman may boast of her "virtue" until doom's day, but "if her soul is small and her heart stingy" her example is not worthy of imitation—for she is only good to herself. She has no way of proving the ownership ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley
... all who experience this affection, is the union of souls in a true marriage. Whatever of beauty or romance there may be in the lover's dream, is enhanced and spiritualized in the intimate communion of married life. The crown of wifehood and maternity is purer, more divine, than that of the maiden. Passion is ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... drawn fresh breath in the meantime, and while she felt tenderly, almost maternally, sorry for Jack Fyfe, she swung back to the old attitude. Even granting, she argued, that she could muster courage to take up the mantle of wifehood where she laid it off, there was no surety that they could do more than compromise. There was the stubborn fact that she had openly declared her love for another man, that by her act she had plunged her husband into far-reaching ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... any of these agencies had I possessed them! If my wifehood and motherhood, my affections and my helplessness were not advocates strong enough to win my cause, I could not have borne to ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... of which he uttered several things rather disturbing to the nerves of Mrs. Mumbray, and other ladies present.—Woman, it was true, lived an imperfect life if she did not become wife and mother; but this truism had been insisted on to the exclusion of another verity quite as important: that wifehood and motherhood, among civilized people, implied qualifications beyond the physical. The ordinary girl was sent forth into life with a mind scarcely more developed than that of a child. Hence those monstrous errors she constantly committed when ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... the supreme act of surrender—that, more than all else, renounces for ever and ever Philip, honour, wifehood, and lays her ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... birth to their children, and go through the established routine of dinners and calls. If there is any complaint respecting the work they have to do, it is of the deficit, and the inferior health of the women between their school-days and their wifehood is to be accounted for by the want of occupation and independence. They have no more to do, and no more chance to exercise their wills, than during the first six years of ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett |
