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Womanhood   /wˈʊmənhˌʊd/   Listen
Womanhood

noun
1.
The state of being an adult woman.  Synonym: muliebrity.
2.
Women as a class.  Synonyms: fair sex, woman.  "Woman is the glory of creation" , "The fair sex gathered on the veranda"
3.
The status of a woman.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Womanhood" Quotes from Famous Books



... spiritual life. From this time forward Francesca avoided all unnecessary conversations, and became habitually silent. There was no moroseness in her silence; it never interfered with the kindnesses or the courtesies of life; but as in childhood she had been remarkable for it, so in womanhood it distinguished her, and especially since her illness and miraculous recovery. Vannozza inquired of her one day what it was that made her so habitually silent, and she answered, "God expects more of us than ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton

... current legislation along these lines. I, too, rejoice that an awakened conscience has outlawed commercial standards that were false or low and that an awakened humanity has decreed that the working and living condition of our citizens must be worthy of true manhood and true womanhood. ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge

... respectability and power of the family, and the beauty and behavior of the girl. The arrangements here described are often made when the girl is only five or six years of age, in which case she remains with her friends until womanhood, and then goes to the house of ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the shops and mills. I want to destroy this tyranny. They (the Feminists) want to destroy womanhood.' They do this by attempting to drive women into the world and turn them away from the home. This is what is wrong with the woman's world: ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... Conflicting and confusing emotions, a sense of outrage and revolt, were making me first hot and then cold, and distrust and suspicion and baffling helplessness were enveloping me beyond resistance. The happy ignorance and unconcern and indifference of my girlhood, my young womanhood, were vanishing before cruel and compelling verities, and that which, because of its ugliness, its offensiveness, its repulsiveness, I had wanted to know nothing about, I knew I would now be ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher

... passion, conflict and agony, desire and despair. She was not one of those befrilled, fashion-plate dolls that one meets at the after-war crushes and dances, but was austerely simple in dress, with a face which betrayed a spiritual nobility, the very incarnation of modern womanhood, alive with modern self-knowledge, modern weariness ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux

... selected as the principal beneficiaries in her initial work of up-lift, arrived a half-hour before the time set for the meeting of the Civitas Society, and were shown into the drawing-room. Mrs. Schmidt, a thin wisp of faded womanhood, effaced herself in a remote corner, while Mrs. McMahon, a brawny Amazon with red, round face and shrewdly twinkling eyes, frankly wandered about the room, scrutinizing the furnishings and ornaments and commenting on them without ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... feminine. Although the good Mrs. Schmittheimer was not unfrequently visited by female compatriots who condoled with her and drank her coffee and ate her kuchen, after the fashion of sympathetic, suffering womanhood, she wearied of this loneliness; she was, in fact, as anxious to get away from the old place as Alice and I were to get ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field

... of the men and women of the Central Western States, and especially those of the City of Chicago into whose hands it may come, to the vicious, thoroughly organized white-slave traffic of to-day, and its attendant, far-reaching, horrible results upon the young man and womanhood of our Land. ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann

... look up towards the castle, and picture the morrow's consummation; and his heart would have a convulsion. Imagination flew on the wings of his desire. She stood before him in all her sumptuous womanhood, tender and strong and glowing. As he spoke, her eyes lightened, her eyes burned, the blood came and went in her cheeks; her lips parted. Then she whispered something; and his heart leapt terribly; and he called her name—"Beatrice! Beatrice!" Her name ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... woman has a very masculine air, extending indeed more or less to her whole bearing; for even her features have rarely the feminine delicacy of higher womanhood. In the Negro, on the contrary, the narrowness of chest and shoulder characteristic of the woman is almost as marked in the man; indeed, it may well be said, that, while the Indian female is remarkable for her masculine build, the negro ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... growth, development, and beauty seemed something magical, incomprehensible. He had left them in the lank, homely, tooth-shedding period, at the time he placed them in school, and when he returned to see them graduated, here were two blooming maidens on the very borderland of charming womanhood. The usual love and pride of a father was in him a rapture made up of the love given to his very own, and also of the admiration that a man, little thrown among women, is apt to feel for those of his fireside. Then, too, these were the ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... any meaning in such a promise, Jeanne, however old she may then have been, could not have been quite a child. And it seems probable that the angel and the saints appeared to her first when she was on the threshold of womanhood, that is, if she ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... we returned to St. Louis, with joyous anticipations of the future. The darling of our hearts was fast blooming into womanhood. Her father had purchased the residence which my brother had built for his own use, and which, above all others, we preferred, (especially as it was near to that of his aged mother), and we hoped before long to be ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless

... the bounty of an aristocrat, to read the said aristocrat a lecture on his duties and responsibilities, as landlord of Aberalva town; then will that person be altogether disappointed. It would have looked very well, doubtless: but it would have been equally untrue to Grace's womanhood, and to her notions of Christianity. Whether all men were or were not equal in the sight of Heaven, was a notion which, had never crossed her mind. She knew that they would all be equal in heaven, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... with a tact, or it might be truer to say a contact, so perfect, that it even left more charms to be imagined than it displayed, though the outline of the whole figure was that of the most lovely womanhood. But, notwithstanding the exquisite modelling of the whole form, the almost fairy lightness of the full, swelling, but small foot, about which nothing seemed lean and attenuated, the exquisite hand that appeared from among the ruffles of the dress, Paul stood longest in ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... which skill might muster. The sword of your fathers fights against you, my Lord—against you that are their disgrace. They loved honor and truth; you betrayed honor, you knew not truth. They revered womanhood; you reverence nothing, and your life smirches your mother's memory. Ah, believe me, they all fight against you! Can you not see them, my Lord?—yonder at my back?—old Aluric Floyer and all those honest gentlemen, whose blood now blushes in your body—ay, blushes ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... I thought sometime That I could do without him well, Communing with the heaven at prime, And in my womanhood could dwell ...
— Fringilla: Some Tales In Verse • Richard Doddridge Blackmore

... in the autumn twilight. Both were lovely; beautiful women in the typical style of island beauty, which not even the primness of their somewhat old-fashioned costume could wholly disguise. For their eyes were dark and sparkling, and their cheeks glowed with the rosy bloom of a healthy and innocent womanhood. They were talking in low tones of the troubles of the time and of their absent friends; their language was in ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene

... that is still kept up is the Puberty Dance. Many white people have seen this, but not having any clew to its significance, it seemed absurd and frivolous. When a girl enters the door of young womanhood the Washoe idea is to make this an occasion for developing wiriness, strength, and vigor. Contrary to the method of the white race, she is made, for four consecutive days, to exert herself to the utmost. She must walk and climb mountains, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... her cheeks glowing from the quick work. Jacob Welse hesitated. Though he stood within reach of the gunwale, a gulf of three years was between. The womanhood of twenty, added unto the girl of seventeen, made a sum more prodigious than he had imagined. He did not know whether to bear-hug the radiant young creature or to take her hand and help her ashore. But there was no apparent hitch, for she ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... heart-breaking than that of their companions. Here we see a mother bending with agonized looks over some white-faced, wasted boy, whose days, even hours, are clearly numbered; there a father of a wizen-faced, terribly deformed girl, a mite to look at, but fast approaching womanhood, brought hither to be put straight and beautiful. Next our eye lights on the emaciated form of a young man evidently in the last stage of consumption, his own face hopeful still, but what forlornness in that of ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... the young adults of the village were present at such lessons, as were within the reach of their comprehension, and as the children had a separate instructor, the young women and girls of Dormilleuse, who were growing up to womanhood, were now the only persons for whom a system of instruction was unprovided. But these stood in as great need of it as the others, and more particularly as most of them were now manifesting Christian dispositions. I therefore proposed that they should assemble of an evening in the room, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various

... humanity—in forcing good morals and good manners, in giving a reason and so a desire for peaceful arts and industries, the place it has had in persuading men and women that only self-restraint, courage, good cheer, and reverence produce the highest types of manhood and womanhood,—this is written on every ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... the eager naivete of a child, which Smoke found hard to reconcile with the full womanhood of ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... storm-tossed mariner, fighting the billows of a hungry sea, for those whose true and pure love had suffered the crucifixion of death, and for the glorious dead on the field of battle, it is very easy to see Freya as her worshippers saw her—an ideal of perfect womanhood. ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... moment Errington's kiss had roused her dormant womanhood, and then the events of daily life had crowded round and lulled it asleep once more. In swift succession there had followed the vivid interest of increasing musical study, the stirrings of ambition, and a whole world of new people to ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... the clatter this woman's voice rose suddenly as clear as the call of a thrush, and the hot space seemed to cool and the hot air to clean as she sang. She who sang was a girl of five and twenty, whom it had pleased to clothe her ripe womanhood in a boy's habit, that clasped her fine body as close as a second skin, and she might have passed for a man no otherwhere than in a madhouse. She looked very charming in the stained and faded daintiness of her male attire. She wore a green velvet doublet ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... there, and had lifted the sashes, and got the spy-glass ready, the flow of the tide was almost spent, and the brimming moment of the slack was nigh. For this all the folk of the village waited, according to the tradition of the place; the manhood and boyhood, to launch forth; old age, womanhood, and childhood, to contribute the comfort of kind looks and good-by. The tides, though not to be compared to the winds in fickleness, are capricious here, having sallies of irregularity when there has been a long period of ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... "Ligeia"—this myth called into being by the enchantment of his own fancy—not only became as real as if she had been flesh and blood; his pagan soul bowed down before her and she blotted from his mind, for the time, all thought or consciousness of more robust womanhood. She became, in imagination, the sharer of his studies, the wife of his bosom, and he sat at her feet and gladly learned from her the beautiful, strange secrets of this ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... revealed, never suspected; yet now, here, it rose up to throw into insignificance all the other qualities of the girl he had known. Bob spared a swift thought of gratitude to the chance that had revealed to him this unguessed, intimate phase of womanhood. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... bewildered as the others, but she slipped her hand into his and away they ran ingloriously, the foe too much astounded to jeer. She sought to comfort him by saying (and it brought her a step nearer womanhood), "You wasn't feared for yourself, you wasn't; you was just ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... her beauty that made Leonard's heart suddenly stop beating; for she was not considered a beauty, in society. It was something rarer than perfect beauty, yet even more difficult to describe,—a serene, unconscious grace, a pure, lofty maturity of womanhood, such as our souls bow down to in the Santa Barbara of Palma Vecchio. Her features were not "faultlessly regular," but they were informed with the finer harmonies of her character. She was a woman, at whose feet a noble man might ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor

... sons and two daughters, all grown up to manhood and womanhood, in this year, and the parish chapel never saw, in their time, a finer family for stature, symmetry, and comeliness, attend its mass than Michael Boland, his wife, and children. With the growth of his family, his ambition ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... flight, with its hardships and its dangers, which followed the escape, was only the symbol of her life. She stepped from the shelter of her girlhood, as she stepped across the threshold of the villa, into a womanhood dark with many trials, storm-swept and wandering. She might reach the queendom which was her due, as the berlin in which she was to travel might—nay, surely would—rush one day from the gorges into the plains and the sunlight of Italy; but had Wogan travelled ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason

... which, from his limited horizon and under his expectation of the speedy return of Christ, was sensible and good; but when this advice, with all its reasons, was made on oracle of eternal wisdom, it generated the monkish notions concerning womanhood. If the desire of a wife is a weakness, which the apostle would gladly have forbidden, only that he feared worse consequences, an enthusiastic youth cannot but infer that it is a higher state of perfection not to desire a wife, and therefore aspires to "the crown of virginity." Here at ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... three girls were about as fresh as is a dried prune. They had jumped from childhood into full-blown womanhood (or thought they had), thereby missing the very best and sweetest part of their ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... ordinary care of her person, was left in the young widow of thirty-five. Parted from the only man she had ever known, esteemed, and loved, from one who had never caused her the slightest unhappiness, she was no longer conscious of her womanhood; all things were as nothing to her; she no longer even thought of her dress. Nothing was ever more simply done or more complete than this laying down of conjugal happiness and personal charm. Some human beings obtain through love the power of transferring their self—their I—to the being of another; ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... Fair as herself,—but the boy gazed on her; And both were young, and one was beautiful; And both were young,—yet not alike in youth. As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge, The maid was on the eve of womanhood; The boy had fewer summers, but his heart Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye There was but one beloved face on earth, And that was shining on him; he had looked Upon it till it could not pass away; He had no breath, no being, but in hers; ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... of about medium height, and her exquisite figure was already assuming the rounded graces of budding womanhood. Her skin was a clear pale olive with just the faintest and most delicate tinge of colour in the velvety cheek; her face was a perfect oval, and her small exquisitely poised head was covered with a wealth of soft, silky, chestnut hair, so dark as to appear ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... aspect, had not the ruddy complexion, which he was irreverently inclined to call the coarse tint, that is believed the great charm of English beauty. There was a freedom in her step and whole little womanhood, an elasticity, an irregularity, so to speak, that made her memorable from first sight; and when he had encountered her three or four times, he felt in a certain way acquainted with her. She was very simply dressed, and quite ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... in all things, for these cousins represented the two poles of womanhood. Miss Armytage without any of Lady O'Moy's insistent and excessive femininity, was nevertheless feminine to the core. But hers was the Diana type of womanliness. She was tall and of a clean-limbed, supple grace, now emphasised by the riding-habit ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... of error or matter, is Science, dispelling a false sense and leading man into the true sense of selfhood and Godhood; wherein the mortal does not develop the immortal, nor the material the spiritual, but wherein true manhood and womanhood go forth in the radiance of eternal being and its perfections, ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy

... the vision of Beatrice, weaving about her all the poetic fancies of his youth. He must have seen her many times, but no words passed {22} between them till nine years had sped and he chanced to come upon her in all the radiance of her womanhood. She was "between two gentle ladies who were older than she; and passing by in the street, she turned her eyes towards that place where I stood very timidly, and in her ineffable courtesy saluted me so graciously that ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... worthy manner. I listened with pleasure to the thoughtful and earnest ideals to be discerned underlying the girl's practically expressed ideas, and delighted in the humorous intelligence flashing from her clear eyes, and was altogether favourably impressed with her as a type of womanhood—one of the ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... our land, who rule the nation as they mold the characters and guide the actions of their sons, live according to God's holy ordinances, and each, secure and happy in the exclusive love of the father of her children, sheds the warm light of true womanhood, unperverted and unpolluted, upon all within her ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... have never been braided since the gripe of Telamonian Ajax ruffled them so rudely. In her great, troubled eyes you read terrible memories, and a prescience of coming death—death, most grateful to the dishonored princess, but before which the frail womanhood can not but shudder and quail. No wonder that the reverend men glance at her uneasily, scarcely mustering courage enough sometimes to answer her with a pious platitude. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence

... was only beginning to creep to the deeper contours of womanhood, a half curve here and there, a sudden softness in the youthful lines, certain angles trembling on the slightest of rolls, a hint, a suggestion, the shadowy prophecy of circles and half hoops that could not yet roll: the trip ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... that first night. I was mad then over the wrong done to what little womanhood I could claim for my own. I hated Yturrio. I hated Pakenham. They had both insulted me. I hated every man. I had seen nothing but the bitter and desperate side of life—I was eager to take revenge even upon the innocent ones of this world, ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough

... are the bunches of grapes—many the sip of their pure juice, that the sufferer gets from her hands. They seem, they are 'ministering angels;' and while all around us are our avowed enemies, they remain true to every instinct of womanhood. They dare lift the finger to help, they do relieve many a sufferer. All through the South our sick and wounded soldiers have had reason to bless the 'Sisters of Charity.' They have ministered to their wants and performed those kind ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... drinking. It is possible to teach very young children to use such food as is best for them, and to refrain from the eating of things harmful; and it should be one of the first concerns of every mother to start her children on the road to manhood and womanhood, well ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... all poverty and pain that care or tenderness could relieve or heal. Loadstones they were, as steadily bringing the light of gentle and wise souls about them as the crest of their guardian mountain gives pause to the morning clouds: in themselves, they were types of perfect womanhood in its constant happiness, queens alike of their own hearts and of a Paradise in which they knew the names and sympathized with the spirits of every living creature that God had made to play therein, or to blossom in its sunshine ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin

... the back of the stage, and still spinning, shook out her hair, and flung herself backwards, till it streamed and eddied with the whirlwind of her dance. In her fantastic dress (she wore her colours, the red and black) her very womanhood had vanished, she was a mere insignificant morsel of flesh and blood, inspired by the dizzy, reckless Fury ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... goodness usually go away sorrowful when they learn what it costs. But life ever is putting to us just such tests as the wise teacher put to the rich young man. You say you desire character, the perfection of manhood or womanhood above all other things; do you desire this enough to pay for it your ease, your coveted fame, your cherished gold, perhaps your present good name and peace of mind? Is the search for character a ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope

... gathers him in her capacious embrace as if to shield him from some impending danger. The Sistine Madonna, on the other hand, is the most spiritual of Raphael's creations, the perfect embodiment of ideal womanhood. The mother's love is here transfigured by the spirit of sacrifice. Forgetful of self, and obedient to the heavenly summons, she bears her son forth ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... thought, rebellious against, I will not say the restraints, but even the convenances of civilised life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, whom it were blasphemy to think of in the same day with noble womanhood as we all have known it—if that, I say, is the type of the young mondaine of the hour, then I have no doubt they will give the novelists and playwrights plenty of employment in describing their self-imposed torments, the insufferable bondage to which ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... was more than twenty years her senior, had seen Esther Johnson growing up into womanhood. He had been to her as a master, a position he always liked to assume towards women.[45] When he settled in Ireland it was arranged that Esther and her companion, Mrs. Dingley, should also live there. ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... wife, Juana, chief of the lavanderas, or washwomen, and several children, the oldest of whom, Magdalena, was now growing into the fresh and early womanhood of these Southern races. Already she had lovers, who took such opportunities as the strict discipline of the Mission life allowed (and they were rare) to endeavor to awake a response in her heart. But she held herself aloof from all. Proud of the Spanish blood in her veins, though that blood ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase

... farmer who provides our food would descend our choicest benedictions. If the scales could but fall from our eyes that we might behold the visions which our food foretells, we could look down the vista of the years and see the children grown to manhood and womanhood, happy and busy in their work of ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... now only of fulfilment. She was wasting cruelly away! Why should he leave her where she was? Leave her to profane herself and all womanhood in the arms of a man ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... thou art changed by some deep miracle. The flower of womanhood hath bloomed in thee,— ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke

... trained nurse, had attended a St. Louis politician during a long illness. Upon his recovery he married his nurse and as promptly deserted her, providing a modest support for the child. She had grown to womanhood in a cheap boarding school, attaining thereby a superficial education but sufficient to enable her to pass the preliminary examinations necessary to begin her studies in the medical college which was an outcast among its kind and known among the profession as a "diploma mill." She selected it because ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart

... enormous literature of lynching is devoted to a discussion of its causes, but most of that discussion is ignorant and some of it is deliberately mendacious. The majority of Southern commentators argue that the motive of the lynchers is a laudable yearning to "protect Southern womanhood," despite the plain fact that only a very small proportion of the blackamoors hanged and burned are even so much as accused of molesting Southern womanhood. On the other hand, some of the negro intellectuals of the North ascribe the recurrent butcheries ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan

... that he gained a show of feeling; he had learnt that feeling was wanted. Passion, he had not a notion of: otherwise he would not be delaying; the interview, dramatized by the father of the young bud of womanhood, would be taking place, and the entry into Lakelands calculable, for Nataly's comfort, as under the aegis of the Cantor earldom. Gossip flies to a wider circle round the members of a great titled family, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... not what he had expected,—was, indeed, so incongruous with the cell next door and the general poverty of the castle as a whole that it seemed unreal; for here was a trim and tasteful boudoir lit by a silver lamp, warmed by a charcoal fire, and giving some suggestion of dainty womanhood by a palpable though delicate odour of rose-leaves conserved in pot-pourri. Tapestry covered more than three-fourths of the wall, swinging gently in the draught from the open window, a harpischord stood in a corner, a couch that had apparently been occupied stood between the fireplace ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... classroom in disdain that was not wholly sincere, feeling that perhaps the secret of her race lay behind those dark eyes upon which her long lashes flung a quick shadow. He had told himself bitterly as he walked through the streets that she was a figure of the womanhood of her country, a bat-like soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying awhile, loveless and sinless, with her mild lover and leaving him to whisper of innocent transgressions in the latticed ear of a priest. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... of that mould his grandmother could know, and went forward with some hesitation. At his approach the apparition turned, and he beheld, developed into blushing womanhood, one who had once been known to him as the village maiden Tabitha Lark. Seeing Swithin, and apparently from an instinct that her presence would not be desirable just then, she moved ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... out by Tenby harbour, where you and I sat one day seven years ago, and quoted G. Herbert? Lusia tells me also that nice Mary Allen is to be married to your brother—Charles, I think. She is really one of the pleasantest remembrances of womanhood I have. I suppose she sits still in an upper room, with an old turnip of a watch (tell her I remember this) on the table beside her as she reads wholesome books. As I write, I remember different parts of the house and the garden, and the fields about. Is ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald

... disfranchisement of the Negro has wrought great harm to our Democratic form of government, it has increased in the Negro the spirit of patience, self-reliance, self-sacrifice, and, in fact, it has enhanced in him all of those virtues which make for true manhood and womanhood. ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards

... or game that was played, among them. The occasions for such tenderness towards him were so many, that her mind misgave her often, it would indeed be better to go back to the old house, and live again within the shadow of its dull walls, undisturbed. How few who saw sweet Florence, in her spring of womanhood, the modest little queen of those small revels, imagined what a load of sacred care lay heavy in her breast! How few of those who stiffened in her father's freezing atmosphere, suspected what a heap of fiery coals was piled ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... the mother her speechless child; to separate the husband from the wife of his heart; to wring riches from the unpaid toil of human beings; to tear down the family altar, and let lecherous beasts, who claim the name of "Christian," run over defenceless womanhood as swine over God's altar!—is there any thing worse, do you ask? Yes! To work a human being from youth to old age, to appropriate the labor of that being exclusively, to rob it of the blessings of this life, to poison every domestic charity, ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... mother's behalf—and as such, I appeal to the boasted southern chivalry, upon which you pride yourself, for immunity from insult while I am under your roof. Since I stood no taller than your knee, my mother has striven to inculcate a belief in the nobility, refinement, and chivalric deference to womanhood, inherent in southern gentlemen; and if it be not all a myth, I invoke its protection against abuse of my father. A stranger, but a lady, every inch, I demand the respect due ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... apple and pear diffuse with light, that very Soon strews itself on the floor; and keep the radiance of spring Fresh quivering; keep the sunny-swift March-days waiting In a little throng at your door, and admit the one who is plaiting Her hair for womanhood, and play awhile with her, then ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... were all out of work, except the father, who was away, trying to make a trifle by hawking writing-paper and envelopes. This woman told us that she was in great trouble about one of her children—the eldest daughter, now grown up to womanhood. "She got married to a sailor about two year ago," said she, "an' he wint away a fortnit after, an' never was heard of since. She never got the scrape ov a pen from him to say was he alive or dead. She never heard ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh

... true, simple and kind was she, Noble of mien, with gracious speech to all, And gladsome looks—a pearl of womanhood. ...
— The Essence of Buddhism • Various

... herself up in indignation, Bancroft thought he had never seen any one so lovely. "A perfect Hebe," he said to himself, and started as if he had said the words aloud. The comparison was apt. Though Miss Loo Conklin was only seventeen, her figure had all the ripeness of womanhood, and her height—a couple of inches above the average—helped to make her look older than she was. Her face was more than pretty; it was, in fact, as beautiful as youth, good features, and healthy colouring could make it. A knotted mass of chestnut ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris

... a handsome maid in the height and bloom of womanhood, with all that wonderful freshness and magnetism which was developed and preserved by the life of the wilderness. She had already given five maidens' feasts, beginning with her fifteenth year, and her shy and diffident purity was held ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... whose well wishing I owe my gratitude, inspired me with high respect for their character. In my former nurse there seemed to me a pattern of tireless and sagacious activity of a high order and breeding.... Thus a high respect for true womanhood was implanted in me. On the other hand I was as a boy made so accustomed to this rle by several young women, who entertained themselves with me and considered me as their lover to while away their time, that I later retained the inclination ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... of the war, they went back to their secluded homes, and between them and the world the curtain fell again. We very well know that mortals cannot rise above their surroundings only within defined limits. Alas! for the defeated manhood and blasted womanhood in our land, held down to earth by unfortunate surroundings. They are looking to you for help. You have done nobly in sustaining a work in their midst. Besides what you have done at Pleasant Hill, Grand View and other points, you have enabled us to ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various

... for the conduct of their children. Therefore, one of the highest duties of a parent to his children is to exact obedience in all right things, in order that the children may be trained to true manhood and womanhood. ...
— Elements of Civil Government • Alexander L. Peterman

... him. And he may be sure that the "Poet" (Dwight) was there, for the man of music and song could not despise the poetry of motion, neither could his social soul neglect the opportunity of seeing so much enjoyment, and feasting his eyes on those developing buds of womanhood, those fair-haired, clear- eyed, joyous young girls who were present. And the curly-headed, witty "Time-Keeper" (Cabot) was there because he enjoyed dancing and fun. And the tall, manly, handsome-faced, clear-complexioned "Hero" (Butterfield), whose curls more than rivalled the other, looking ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. There is a time when we are not content to be such merchants or doctors or lawyers as we see on the dead level or below it. The woman longs to glorify her womanhood as sister, wife, or mother. Here is God,—God standing silently at the door all day long,—God whispering to the soul, that to be pure and true is to succeed in life, and whatever we get short of that will burn up like stubble, though the whole ...
— Daily Strength for Daily Needs • Mary W. Tileston

... the service, she would have found him plenty of satisfactory reasons for not going to Africa, and he had not been the kind of man whom gossips care to call a coward. Reasons? She would have invented twenty in those days, when she was not a nun, but just a loving girl with all her womanhood ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford

... she, trading thus, even in thought, on her bruised and wearied body? What had she fallen to, what was it that had deadened all that was softer and better and purer within her, that she could thus see slip away from her the last solace and dignity of her womanhood? ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... had no children, but had adopted twenty-five. They had brought most of these to manhood and womanhood, and many were married. Perhaps their care, dots for the daughters, and estates for the sons, had made the parents poor. One was the blood son of Prince Hinoe, and was now a youth, and worked about the plantation of the chief. His christened name was Ariipaea Temanutuanuu Teariitinorua Tetuanui ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... she protested. "You won't understand me; you can't. I am no woman's rights' creature; and I stand, not for the new woman, but for the new womanhood. Because I am sincere; because I desire to be natural, and honest, and true; and because I am consistent with myself, you choose to misunderstand it all and to lay wrong strictures upon me. I do try to be consistent, and I think I fairly succeed; ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... tender, and more charitable as concerns the effects upon women of certain inevitable conditions as to which the layman is ignorant or indifferent. But the very fulness of the husband's appreciation of a woman's drawbacks and little moral ailments, the outcome of her womanhood, becomes dangerous when he ventures to be her medical caretaker. What he coolly decides in another's case, he cannot in hers. How can he see her suffer and not give her of the abundance of relief in his hands? She is quick to know and to profit ...
— Doctor and Patient • S. Weir Mitchell

... a fatherly solicitude toward these youths, so his wife spent upon them her unused motherly gift and feeling. She had never buried any of the ardent desires of her womanhood; she had never known sickness. In spite of the shadow of her childlessness she went on living her full, significant woman's life, and constantly defied the gnawing thoughts of what might have been by a cheerful acceptance of what life offered her. She was the daughter of a tailor, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... lovely Frankie stood, In the dear pride of womanhood, The queen of Elfindale; One sought her for her loveliness— A joy—a heaven of happiness— An earth-born angel meant to bless My throbbing soul with rich excess Of joys that never fail. She sat hid in a garden bower, Watching ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley

... to cast light on each?— I drop it at thy feet. I cannot teach My hand to hold my spirit so far off From myself—me—that I should bring thee proof In words, of love hid in me out of reach. Nay, let the silence of my womanhood Commend my woman-love to thy belief,— Seeing that I stand unwon, however wooed, And rend the garment of my life, in brief, By a most dauntless, voiceless fortitude, Lest one touch of this heart ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... strong, healthy specimens of young womanhood, presumably able to endure a good deal of cold and exposure without danger of serious harm. But this little sensitive plant! Jeff waited in suspense for ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond

... them, for they took her when an orphan, gave her a comfortable home, and reared her to womanhood with virtue, intelligence ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... accepted the rule of shame imposed on them by men, but only custom inspires the modesty for which they are praised; it is really an outrage to their sex. This reversal of psychological laws has, however, only been accepted by women with a struggle. Primitive woman, proud of her womanhood, for a long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always represented. And in the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... words, Classidas and his captains hurrying to the walls to carry on the fierce exchange of abuse. To be called dairy-maid and peronnelle was a light matter, but some of the terms used were so cruel that, according to some accounts, she betrayed her womanhood by tears, not prepared apparently for the use of such foul weapons against her. The Journal du Siege declares, however, that she was "aucunement yree" (angry), but answered that they lied, and rode back to ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... Christianity would be an effete thing of the past. James Russell Lowell rose, the blood rushing to his cheeks, and quietly said: "Show me twelve miles square in the world in which I live where childhood is cared for, where womanhood is reverenced, where old age is protected, where life and property are absolutely safe, where it is possible for a decent man to live decently—where the Gospel of Jesus Christ has not gone before and made that life ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple

... to the realm of music and flowers. I beg you to remember that. You have no right to throw over her the shadow of your religious perplexities any more than I would have the right to lay before her my knowledge of parasitic growths. Youth, and especially young womanhood, has its rights, and one of them is to be blithe. You admit that you are losing faith; why destroy hers? Your doubts and despairs should not touch her. But they have. She is troubled and sad by reason of your attitude towards life, and especially by ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... mistress. Aug——ta, at the early age of fifteen, eloped from St. James's, on a matrimonial speculation with a young musician, Mr. An——y C——, (himself a boy of 18)! From such a union what could be expected? a mother at 16, and a neglected dishonoured wife, before she had counted many years of womanhood. If she fell an unresisting victim to the seduction which her youth, beauty, and musical talents attracted, 'her stars were more to blame than she.' Let it be recorded, however, that her conduct as wife and mother was free from reproach, until a depraved, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle

... to his couch at night without a thought of the daughter he had left in the North—growing from a child to womanhood out of his sight. Nor had Janice Day with all her manifold interests forgotten for one single day her father and his lonely ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long

... into womanhood by fashion even more rapidly than boys into manhood. They are dressed in the most expensive manner from their infancy, and without much regard to their health. Bare arms and necks, and short skirts are the rule, even in the bleakest ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... behind it, and on this little property he had lived ever since. About the age of twenty- five he had married an industrious young woman, by whom he had one daughter, who died before reaching years of womanhood. His wife, however, had survived her daughter many years, and had been a great comfort to him, assisting him in his rural occupations; but, about four years before the present period, he had lost her, since which time he had lived alone, making ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... heard of an unkind word in that family, and those six children grew up into splendid young manhood and womanhood. Their mother is still the blessed sun of their existence. She is prettier, healthier and happier now, and so proud of ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne

... them in her sitting-room. She was of the slender, big-eyed, sensitive type of womanhood; her piquant face marred by the evidences of sleeplessness and tears. To Average Jones she gave her confidence at ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... before there were clocks there were candles marked in lengths and sand flowing through narrow orifices, water dripping into jars, and posts stuck in the ground with marks for the shadow to divide the day. The ancient ones related womanhood to the moon and understood that time was vital in the course ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith

... flush. First a red spot started out in either cheek; then they spread till they covered the cheeks; next her forehead took a roseate hue, and down her neck the tide of color rushed, and she stood there before him a glowing statue of outraged womanhood, while in the midst her eyes sparkled ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... came slowly in, and sat on the rude bench which leaned against the logs near the door. The strain of the day was drawing out all the strength, the womanhood, that lay behind her buoyant youth. Already the tan was fading from her face, here in the hut and under the protecting elms; and the whiteness of her skin gave her, instead of a worn appearance, the look of an older ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin

... to the taxes they paid. This is as true of one portion of our country as of another. It is as true for the negro as for the white man. The white man, if he is wise, will decline to allow the Negroes in a mass to grow to manhood and womanhood without education. Unquestionably education such as is obtained in our public schools does not do everything towards making a man a good citizen; but it does much. The lowest and most brutal criminals, those for instance who commit the crime of rape, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt

... profusely scattered over the lower portions of the city, present the most miserable phase of this disgusting evil. Nearly all these places are kept by men, though nominally under control of their mistresses and wives, who are generally hideous specimens of womanhood, and whose features present the traits of sensuality, cruelty and avarice as clearly expressed as if traced there by Belial himself. The men, flashily dressed and bejeweled, their flabby features decorated by a huge dyed mustache, frequent race courses and other places ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... passion of the artist had already guided him to this lucky phrase. It is addressed by Holiness—a dame surely as far abstracted from the enthusiasms of love as we can readily conceive of—to Una, who, like the visionary Helen of Dr. Faustus, has every charm of womanhood, except that of being alive as ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... and we abhor that red word 'War'; But look ye, Brothers, what this war has done for daughters and for son, For manhood and for womanhood, whose trend Seemed year on year toward weakness to descend. Upon this woof of darkness and of terror, woven by human error, Behold the pattern of a new race-soul, And it shall last ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... most comical of the clerical claims is this—that Christianity has promoted chivalry and respect for womanhood. In ancient Greece and Rome the woman was the equal and helpmate of man; we read in Tacitus about the splendid women of the Germans, who took part in public councils, and even fought in battles. Two thousand years before the Christian era we are told by Maspero that the Egyptian ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... on her by accident, yet as a symbol of smartness it gave her a kind of distinction. It appeared to have fallen from the skies; it was put on in the wrong place, and it did not nestle, as it should do, and appear to grow out of the hair, since that glory of womanhood, in her case of a dull brown, going slightly grey, was smooth, scarce and plainly parted. Madame Frabelle really would have looked her best in a cap of the fashion of the sixties. But she could carry off anything; and some people said that ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson

... pleas on these occasions was for the rightful place of English Literature—and especially Poetry—in the school curriculum. He magnified the office of the teacher and deplored the apathy of the public towards those entrusted with the training of the future manhood and womanhood of the nation. 'No expenditure,' he cried, 'is considered too great to be grudged on war and armaments by land and by sea, on construction works such as railways, bridges, harbours and naval stations, but the needs of the common school rouse little, if any, interest or enthusiasm. And yet it ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan

... the heroic, exalts a gratification into a duty, and preaches to her sex as from the standpoint of a morality superior to theirs, we shall set it down as it seems to us. But, for the sake of manhood as well as of womanhood, we would not that any mean or malignant hand should endeavor to show where she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various

... his aesthetic cravings, and the responsive vivacity of their nature prepared him ever new surprises. He felt a strange fascination in the presence of these women, and the conviction grew upon him that their type of womanhood was superior to any he had hitherto known. And by way of refuting his own argument, he would draw from his pocketbook the photograph of Bertha, which had a secret compartment there all to itself, and, gazing tenderly at it, ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... surviving son, Edward Browne, had become a scholar after his father's own heart; and though not inheriting his genius, was already renowned in London, one of the physicians to the King, and in a way to become, as afterward he did, President of the College of Physicians. All his daughters who had attained womanhood had been well married. He lived in the society of the honorable and learned, and had received from the King ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... the higher beauty to attain the lower one. A woman who will sacrifice domestic affection, conscience, self-respect, honor, to love of dress, we all agree, loves dress too much. She loses the true and higher beauty of womanhood for the lower beauty of gems and flowers and colors. A girl who sacrifices to dress all her time, all her strength, all her money, to the neglect of the cultivation of her mind and heart, and to the neglect of the claims of others on her helpfulness, is sacrificing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... times when they must show their superiority to "mere man" in being the stronger of the two, mentally if not physically, and Ralph Jackson knew when he called Mary "wife" she would endow him with all the wealth of her pure womanhood, sacredly kept for the clean-souled young man, whose devotion she finally rewarded by promising to marry him ...
— Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit - among the "Pennsylvania Germans" • Edith M. Thomas

... contract marriage and make a will; but majority was not reached until the age of twenty-five. By English law there are two great periods into which life is divided—infancy, which lasts in both sexes until the twenty-first year, and manhood or womanhood. The period of infancy, again, is divided into several stages, marked by the growing development both of rights and obligations. Thus at twelve years of age a male may take the oath of allegiance; at fourteen both sexes are held to have arrived ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... every principle of justice and mercy to secure some worldly advantage. Rebekah in her beautiful girlhood at the well drawing water for man and beast, so full of compassion, does not exemplify the virtues we looked for, in her mature womanhood. The conjugal and maternal relations so far from expanding her most tender sentiments, making the heart from love to, one grow bountiful to all, seem rather to have narrowed hers into the extreme ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... eddies of the present-day world currents is what has been loosely called the "Woman Movement." The sensitive and vicarious spirit of womanhood has been enlisted for service in behalf of those who have been denied a fair chance, or who are the victims ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz

... never had it stopped so often, as since the revelation which had come from the Registry of Deeds. Mrs. Midas Goldenrod was not a bad woman, but she loved and hated in too exclusive and fastidious a way to allow us to consider her as representing the highest ideal of womanhood. She hated narrow ill-ventilated courts, where there was nothing to see if one looked out of the window but old men in dressing-gowns and old women in caps; she hated little dark rooms with air-tight stoves in them; she hated rusty bombazine ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... for every girl who is growing up to womanhood that it might be brought home to her by some refined and ethically-minded member of her own sex how insufferable a person woman becomes when, like a spoilt child, she exploits the indulgence of man; when she proclaims that it is his duty to serve her and to share with her his power and ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright

... seemed hardly able to realize the truth of their position. From her earliest days, all the blessings that money could procure had been freely scattered around her feet. As she grew up and advanced towards womanhood, she had moved in the most fashionable circles, and there acquired the habit of estimating people according to their wealth and social standing, rather than by qualities of mind. In her view, it appeared degrading in a woman to enter upon any kind of employment for money; and with the keeper of ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur

... plainly dressed, could not gratify the innate vanity of womanhood but by a luxury of cleanliness which became them wonderfully, and made them harmonize with the polished counters and the shining shelves, on which the old man-servant never left a speck of dust, and with the old-world simplicity of all they saw about them. As their style of ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac

... mountaineer. This was partly the result of the conditions under which her girlhood had been spent. She was the only child of a dalesman, who had so far accumulated estate in land as to be known in the vernacular as a statesman. Her mother had died at her birth, and before she had attained to young womanhood her father, who had married late in life, was feeble and unfit for labor. His hand was too nervous, his eye too uncertain, his breath too short for the constant risks of mountaineering; so he put away all further thought of adding store to store, and settled ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine

... is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast—not as a breast"; "Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself—wait, you!" She will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too late for that, so "There, there, both deaths presently." . . . And now let us read again the lamentable dying words of Sebald. ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... could not, even that morning, have told how he felt about Lydia, or whether he had any feeling at all, save a proper gratitude for her tenderness to his father. But he had found her in his path, when his hurt soul was crying out to all fostering womanhood to save him from the ravening claw of woman's cruelty. She had felt his need, and they had looked at each other with eyes that pierced defences. And then, incarnate sympathy, tender youth, she had rested in his arms, and in the generosity of her giving and the exquisiteness ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... in the arts of womanhood had already recommenced. She had been growing fast, feverishly, and was just now passing that period where the desire for masculine admiration innocently rules all else, but where the discovery of it ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers

... in all classes of American society to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No literature comes from it and no religion, though there is much human kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of that idealism which lifts ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... crystal-clear in their delicate imagery, and of the fact that from time to time, when she was first able to listen, her mother read aloud to her. In fact, her first poems were made before she, herself, could write them down. The speculation as to what she will do when she grows to womanhood is a common one. Is it important? A childhood filled with beauty ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... speak; and, that being so, the Bible must stand on one side, for "we" were going to speak. That the highest intellects had been formed on Bible models she denied by instancing Shelley. If she thought that this movement was going to destroy the womanhood of her sex she would not move a finger for its furtherance. She only thought it would give a higher style of womanhood. As to women requiring to be educated before they would know how to use the franchise, she pointed triumphantly to the Government which men had placed ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... very young. He appears also to have been an only child. This doubtless drew him closer to his father, and the want of the early influences of mother or sister may serve to explain why one misses in his poetry something of that gracious tenderness towards womanhood, which, looking to the sweet and loving disposition of the man, one might otherwise have expected to find in it. That he was no common boy we may be very sure, even if this were not manifest from the fact that his father resolved to give him a higher education than was to be obtained under ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... a heart, enthroned: there is no putting by that crown; queens you must always be; queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown, and the stainless scepter, of womanhood. But, alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and violence to work their will among men, in defiance of the power, which, holding straight in gift from the Prince of all Peace, the ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... medicine, able to faithfully carry out the instructions of the physician. She must be keen in detecting imposition, and wise in the administration of charity, knowing that "to deny is often to help, and to give is often to corrupt." Truly, there is no gift of Christian womanhood which has not here ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft

... thought like Edna Sefton, and yet a royal princess could enter a squalid cottage, and take the starving babe to her bosom; and from that day to this Princess Alice has been a type of loving womanhood. ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... world. Under these petty regulations of conduct you were not yourself at all, only a make-believe. Something serious has occurred in your life, and changed all in an instant. You have been thrown against the real world. You find it not to be what you supposed. It is no cause for shame or regret; womanhood lies deeper than any pretense at gentility. Men seldom fail to recognize this fact—their lives of struggle compel them to, but a woman finds it ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish

... tribe {188} has been formed among flowers, not in distant and monstrous geologic aeras, but in the human epoch;—that its 'grace' or favor has been in all countries so felt as to cause its acceptance everywhere for the most perfect physical type of womanhood;—and that the characteristic fruit of the tribe is so sweet, that it has become symbolic at once of the subtlest temptation, and the kindest ministry to the earthly passion of the human race. "Comfort me with apples, for ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... and the wretched captives followed him as if they had been used to this condition all their lives. Here were naked little boys running alone, perhaps thinking themselves upon a holiday; near at hand dragged mothers with babes at their breasts; girls of various ages, some almost ripened into womanhood, others still infantine in form and appearance; old men bent two-double with age, their trembling chins verging towards the ground, their poor old heads covered with white wool; aged women tottering along, leaning upon long staffs, mere living skeletons;—such was the miscellaneous ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson

... should put into effect when they had selected their prairie home. To the young girl, naturally of romantic temperament, the journey of life upon which they had so recently embarked together took on something of the glamour of knightly adventure. Through the roseate lens of early womanhood the vague, undefined difficulties that loomed before her were veiled in a mist of glory, as she felt that no sacrifice could really hurt, no privation could cut too deep, while she was fulfilling her destiny as wife and comrade to the bravest and best of ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... crowning halo, that I could scarcely believe her to be a creature of mortal birth, and bent my head before her as the vision of a being among the celestial orders. But never once did my heart feel for this lofty type of the noblest womanhood a sentiment of human love. Is it that, among the race I belong to, man's pride so far influences his passions that woman loses to him her special charm of woman if he feels her to be in all things eminently superior to himself? But by what strange infatuation ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... art? His granddaughter, whom he loved, was eight years old when he died, yet she had had no teaching, he left no provision for her education although he was rich, and in her mature womanhood she couldn't write and couldn't tell her husband's manuscript from anybody else's—she ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain

... hands of Weird, to wend as she will have me: but I will tell thee that I have hoped and prayed that it might be in no longer space than five years; then shall I be of twenty years and three, and she but a few weeks younger, and manhood and womanhood and due service of the kindred shall lie before us both if I find her alive; but if I find her dead, or have sure witness that so she is, that moment shall I turn my face and come back to you, to live and die ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris

... before he could in any measure atone for the unhappy years of her loveless childhood. He would have kept her a little girl all her life, had he been able; but here she was springing up into the beauty of a glorious womanhood before his very eyes. So he sighed as he thought of his lost opportunities, then abruptly asked, "How ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown

... strength and roughness, without the strength and roughness to protect her, and there is very little doubt that she would express a desire to wake up, some morning, and find herself transformed into a prickly pear. Womanhood, under some circumstances, is very much like sitting partly on one chair, and partly on another, without being ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... the faces of the women and stood for a long time looking down at them. They were both comely, the younger just at the dawn of womanhood. They must have been talking merrily together, for their faces were smiling as ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... felt to be most holy, as the image of some beautiful and beloved being comes and goes before our eyes—brought from a far distance in this our living world, or from a distance—far, far, farther still—in the world beyond the grave—the image of a virgin growing up sinlessly to womanhood among her parents' prayers, or of some spiritual creature who expired long ago, and carried with her her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various

... looked and looked, and wondered, and at last longed: longed to comfort, to cherish, to draw to himself and shelter the budding womanhood before him, so fragile now, so full of promise for the future. And quick as the flame had sprung up under her breath, a magic flame awoke in his heart, and burned high and hot. If ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... reaching the boundary-line where girlhood and womanhood meet, I feel I must address you with the prefix that dignifies this stage of your life, although I seem to know you best as the rosy-cheeked little girl whose name of 'Polly' seemed to fit ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... daughter from the influence of Divine love; to a deep admiration of nature she joined her girlish adoration of the Creator, springing thus into the first way open to the feelings of womanhood. She loved God, she loved Jesus, the Virgin and the saints; she loved the Church and its pomps; she was Catholic after the manner of Saint Teresa, who saw in Jesus an eternal spouse, a continual marriage. Gabrielle gave herself up to this passion of strong souls with so touching a simplicity ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac



Words linked to "Womanhood" :   womankind, berth, billet, stratum, spot, place, social class, class, fair sex, woman, socio-economic class, situation, adulthood, muliebrity, position, office, post



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