"Womanhood" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... troubadours and minnesingers with a halo of religious allegory, was disliked by the Church, not merely from a dread of possible abuses, but as inherently idolatrous. The cult of the Virgin, while doing honour to the new conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most celebrated of the troubadours ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... which is curiously illustrative of the life of the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so important ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... where women need to watch most jealously the weakness of self-sacrifice. Women have had the beauty of "unselfishness," and "amiability" dinned into their ears for so long that there is no depth of degradation, or of abnegation of true womanhood to which they will not descend for the sake of being so considered by those whose interest it is to keep them where they virtually endorse the vices of others by their own lack of self-justice. While we ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... and this poor lady had never had much acquaintance together. A disposition naturally simple and demanding protection; a long course of poverty and humility, of daily privations, and hard words, of kind offices and no returns, had been her lot ever since womanhood almost, or since her luckless marriage with George Osborne. You who see your betters bearing up under this shame every day, meekly suffering under the slights of fortune, gentle and unpitied, poor, and rather despised for their poverty, do you ever ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... danger, protect his master, and quickly anticipate his every wish. The service of this period completed his education, and at twenty-one he was knighted with imposing ceremonies. After partaking of the sacrament, he took vows to speak the truth, defend the weak, honor womanhood, and use his sword for the defense ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... older this year and have less chance," and so they begin to settle into a sound resignation, and snub the more presentable daughters of social inferiors; they either turn into first-class Sunday school teachers, and denounce the pomps of a world whose excess has brought them to solitary womanhood, or they make unrivalled depositaries and disseminators of the local news of their little sphere, but they are as admirable an invention as any other, as they have many hours of leisure to engage in charitable and other occupations. There are ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... not decide from what direction the sounds came; she stopped and they stopped; then she heard the whistle again, but nearer now, and with a sudden realization of loneliness and of the womanhood which had seldom troubled her, she ran with all her strength ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... and along a dozen winding moorland paths there came in scattered groups the worshippers to the Rehoboth shrine. Old men and women, weary with the weight of years, renewed their youth as they drew near to what had been a veritable sanctuary amid their care and sorrow and sin; while manhood and womanhood, leading by the hand their little ones, felt in their hearts that zeal for the house of prayer so common to the dwellers in rural England. Long before the hour of service the chapel-yard was thronged, and from within ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... lovely in her creamy-white satin gown, her small head held regally, the brilliant charm of American womanhood radiating from her. She wore no jewels, save one string of perfectly matched pearls; but on Pauline Lister's neck even ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... "Child, 'tis true indeed, that I am past your aid, And must seek for London surgery, since the wound From explosion of the powder festers sore; Hence I leave our well-loved colony for England— If I live I'll come again unto Virginia. Pocahontas! first as little maid I saw thee, Into noble womanhood I've watched thee growing, Few and fleeting are the years we've known each other, Thou hast ever been the White Man's loyal friend. Keep the trust I give thee with my parting blessing. Still defend these ...
— Pocahontas. - A Poem • Virginia Carter Castleman
... pleasure in infantile life, 72 connected anatomically with centers producing tension, 74 autoerotism of, same in boy and girl, 79 chief, in female child is the clitoris, 80 changed from clitoris to vagina, mark of womanhood, 81 change of leading, determines woman's preference for neuroses, 81 gratified by intercourse between child and foster ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... those of the Sierra, and, like John Phoenix's old lady who had her whole osseous system removed by the patent tooth-puller, departs, leaving her "skeleton" behind her. The bachelor who cares to see unhooped womanhood once more before he dies should go to the Yo-Semite. The scene was three or four times presented to us during our seven weeks' camp there,—though the trip is one which might well cost a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... being very pale began to 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 ...
— Potts's Painless Cure - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... dutiful and sound, and then she suffers bewildered anguish from its potency; or she may league herself with the powers of darkness, and then she is a harlot of Babylon or old Rome. And Tira was good. Whether or not Raven heard the call of her womanhood—here Nan drew back as from mysteries not hers to touch—he did feel to the full the extremity of her peril, the pathos of her helplessness, the spell of her beauty. She was as strong as the earth because it was the maternal ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... 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 the adoring sister by his side! These are ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Bonderlay, it seems, had attained the age of womanhood, when, by the decease of their surviving parent, a man of high moral rectitude, but a stern disciplinarian, they were left in possession of a comfortable independence, fully equal to their moderate wants. They had been governed with such an iron rule, and treated as ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... the obstinacy of the gaze, while that smile peculiar to those who have commanded men relaxed his brow, and restored the native beauty to his lip, "fair child, learn not from thy peevish grandam so uncourteous a lesson as hate of the foreigner. As thou growest into womanhood, know that Norman knight is sworn slave to lady fair;" and, doffing his cap, he took from it an uncut jewel, set in Byzantine filigree work. "Hold out thy lap, my child; and when thou nearest the foreigner scoffed, set this bauble in thy ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... must be remembered that mine was the case of the son of Filippo Balducci—related by Messer Boccaccio in the merry tales of his Decamerone 1—who had come to years of adolescence without ever having beheld womanhood, so that the first sight of it in the streets of Florence affected him so oddly that he vexed his sire with foolish questions and still more ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... form of filial obedience. They were only a poor couple to gratify his Mephistophelian humour, to be sure, but Mrs. Doria was equal to twenty, and they would proclaim the diverse ways with which maidenhood and womanhood took disappointment, while the surrounding Forey girls and other females of the family assembly were expected to develop the finer shades and tapering edges of an agitation to which ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... children with sturdy constitutions, such as we see among the lesser bourgeoisie, whose beauties always seem a little vulgar; and yet, though she resembled the Venus of Milo, the lines of her figure were ennobled by the softer Christian sentiment which purifies womanhood and gives it a distinction unknown to the sculptors of antiquity. She had an enormous head, with the masculine yet delicate forehead of the Jupiter of Phidias, and gray eyes, to which her chaste life, penetrating fully into them, carried a flood of ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... have declared his heart to this man, the hopes, the perplexities, and the self-reproach which had attended ever these early weeks in wonderland. Just as Anna's shrewdness had perceived, so was it the truth that an image of perfect womanhood dazzled his imagination and left him without any clear perception whatever. For little Lois of the slums he had a sterling affection, begotten of long association and of mutual sympathy—but the vision of Anna had been the beatification of his love dream, so to speak, deceiving him by its immense ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... or whether, by some subtle power of suggestion, she willed the doctor to carry out her prophecy. I only know that the prophecy was startlingly fulfilled, for among his children was one little girl who, when she grew to womanhood, did marry the nephew and did get the ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... together in 1827, Anne, who was then eight, chose Guernsey for her imaginary island, and peopled it with 'Michael Sadler, Lord Bentinck, and Sir Henry Halford.' She and Emily were constant companions, and there is evidence that they shared a common world of fancy from very early days to mature womanhood. 'The Gondal Chronicles' seem to have amused them for many years, and to have branched out into innumerable books, written in the 'tiny writing' of which Mr. Clement Shorter has given us facsimiles. 'I am now engaged in writing the fourth volume of Solala Vernon's Life,' ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... code of morals; both are amenable to the same divine law. Both have a right to do the best they can; or, to speak more justly, both should feel the duty, and have the opportunity, to do their best. Each must justify its existence by becoming a complete development of manhood and womanhood; and each should refuse whatever limits or dwarfs ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... them we owe the Great Peace in which we live, and have lived for many countless moons. There is an ancient custom amongst the Coast tribes that when our daughters step from childhood into the great world of womanhood the occasion must be made one of extreme rejoicing. The being who possesses the possibility of someday mothering a man child, a warrior, a brave, receives much consideration in most nations, but to us, the Sunset ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... their love, charity, and faith. Women who have died old and worn out with age, if they have lived in faith in the Lord, in charity to the neighbor, and in happy marriage love with a husband, advance with the succession of years more and more into the flower of youth and early womanhood, and into a beauty that transcends every conception of any such beauty as is seen on the earth. Goodness and charity are what give this form and thus manifest their own likeness, causing the joy ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... sure a great many of you already know our young friend. You have seen her grow from childhood to young womanhood—watched her trudging in to school in all weathers, determined to get an education at any cost—noted her record at school, always at the top or near the top. Perhaps others in Ryeville besides the old men have been cheered by her happy face and ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... no embarrassments or difficulties; I could and did honestly tell him that I had made his wishes my law. But it was hardly in womanhood, I am afraid, to be satisfied with merely replying, and to leave it there. I thought it due to me that Eustace too should concede something, in the way of an assurance which might quiet my mind. As usual with me, the words followed the impulse to speak ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... figures from the next group, allows for a space of time to elapse, and we come to their children, now grown to manhood and womanhood, in their rude strength finding themselves, with the result of Natural Selection. This is a group of five personages, the center figure a man of splendid youth and vigor, suggesting the high state ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... young girls had yet reached the age of womanhood. Gertrudis was only seventeen, while the other was a year and a half younger. Both, however, had acquired that full development of feminine beauty which a tropical climate often calls forth at a much ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... little girl in the niche was carved with wisps of hay in her hands, but the child who had fed the oxen knew nothing of this, and as she grew up she forgot her childish service, so that when she had grown to womanhood and chanced to see this statue over the portal she did not know it was her own self in stone. But what she had done was ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... hated scenes, and during his lifetime he had been forced into a great many. He was unutterably relieved when Faith stopped crying and put her handkerchief away. Something of the childishness in her face seemed to have deepened to womanhood as, for a moment, she raised her ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... stage from the sentimental characters in which she won her first successes to the deeper tragic parts which had begun to make appeal to her ambition. With Mr. Abbey was Mme. Christine Nilsson. Mme. Patti, though she had grown to womanhood and effected her entrance on the operatic as well as concert stage in New York, was not so familiar a figure as Mme. Nilsson. Patti had begun her operatic career at the Academy of Music in 1859, and had gone to Europe, where she remained without revisiting her old home until the fall or ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the tang of Power, The sweet of Womanhood! I drain the lees upon my knees, For oh, the draught is good; I drink to Life, I drink to Death, And smack my lips with song, For when I die, another 'I' shall ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... he said, rising and standing before her, "your answer is painful to me. I had anticipated the winning of your hand and heart. It had not occurred to me that I should fail. I appreciate what you have said. A loftier ideal of the nobleness of true womanhood has come to me. My honor, respect, and love for you are deeper than ever, but I see that what I desired cannot be. I ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... by the other sex worth noticing, for the sake of comparison with other parts of the world. About the time of entering into womanhood, their parents and other relatives collected a quantity of fine mats and cloth, prepared a feast, and invited all the unmarried women of the settlement. After the feast the property was distributed among them, and they dispersed. ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... retired to Elsa's pink and gray boudoir, the eternal envy of Grande Mignon womanhood, ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... Miss Lucy—was a heroine, but she married General Ward; and then Ellen Culpepper was a heroine, but she fluttered out of the book into the sunlight, and was gone; and then came Jane Mason,—and you have seen her girlish beauty, and you will see it develop into gentle womanhood; but the real heroine,—of the real story,—you have not seen her face. You have heard her name, and have seen her moving through these pages with her back consciously turned to you—for being a shy minx, she had no desire to intrude until she was properly ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... an orphan whose parents had died when she was quite a child. I had taken her to my home, and had raised her as my own daughter. How sweet-tempered, how loving she was! She had grown to womanhood with all the attractions of her sex, and, although not a beauty in the sense usually given to that word, she was looked upon as the handsomest girl of St. Gabriel. Her soft, transparent hazel eyes mirrored her pure thoughts; her dark brown hair waved in graceful undulations on ...
— Acadian Reminiscences - The True Story of Evangeline • Felix Voorhies
... make imperative—it is impossible for the most intelligent teacher to do a great deal to help the child to his own. What the Uneasy Woman forgets is that no two children born were ever alike, and no two children who grow to manhood and womanhood will ever live the same life. The effort to make one child like another, to make him what his parents want, not what he is born to be, is one of the most cruel and wasteful in society. It is the woman's ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... "Manfred" are regarded as almost blasphemous, though probably not so meant to be by the poet, in view of the stirring questions of Grecian tragedy; while the longest of his poems, "Don Juan," is an insult to womanhood and a disgrace to genius; for although containing some of the most exquisite touches of description and finest flights of poetic feeling, its theme is along the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... virtue in any of the Italian series, except that of Venice. In Spenser she is of course one of those attendant on Womanhood, but occurs as one of the tenants of the Heart of Man, thus ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... the gulf that lay between them, with the aid of their common surface sympathies and antipathies, which disappeared when the man began to spring forth from the boy (that ambiguous creature, still impregnated with the perfume of womanhood). And bitterly Jacqueline ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... often gave so generously to the needy that they almost impoverished themselves, thus setting an example to the child of self-denial for the general good. His first step alone, the first word spoken, first game killed, the attainment of manhood or womanhood, each was the occasion of a feast and dance in his honor, at which the poor always benefited to the full extent ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... attractive when she stood up and moved across the room, to take her seat at the piano. Her figure was tall and commanding, full, yet faultless in outline, as that of one in the prime of ripe, rich womanhood, and its perfect proportions were fully set off by her close-fitting but perfectly ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... passion the occupation of his earlier years, he passed several seasons, scarcely communicating during that period, with his amiable and gentle wife, for whom, however, as well as for his daughter—now fifteen years of age, and growing rapidly into womanhood —he was by no means wanting in affection. Nor was his return home THEN purely a matter of choice. Although neither quarrelsome nor dissipated in his habits, he had had the misfortune to kill, in a duel, a young lawyer of good family who had accompanied him to Kentucky, and had consequently ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... years were fully apparent, her complexion appeared slightly blotched, all her defects were obtrusive in contrast with the precocious development of beauty in Jacqueline. She was firmly resolved that her stepdaughter's obtrusive womanhood should remain in obscurity a very much longer time, under pretence that Jacqueline was still a child. She was a child, at any rate! The portrait was a lie! an imposture! an affront! ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... formal engagement between them. Cyril seemed to shrink from the materialising of his love by any thought of marriage. To him she was an ideal of womanhood rather than a flesh-and-blood woman. His love for her was a religion; it had no taint of earthly passion ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... for me. That which is fated must be; and grief is easy to those who do naught but grieve. Full of sorrow was my youth, and full of sorrow my womanhood. Full of sorrow was my youth for Bellerophon the slayer of the Chimaera, whom my father drove away by treason; and full of sorrow my womanhood, for thy treacherous father and for thee; and full of sorrow my old age will be (for I see my fate in dreams), when the sons of the Swan shall carry me ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... in the village of Cawsand Bay an aged man stood, supported by an elderly man, at a window, gazing seaward with an expression of intense expectation, while a very aged woman sat crooning over the fire, holding the hand of a fair girl just verging on early womanhood. ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... King's College building, then just completed, and doing well in his studies, but keenly regretting that the war was ended without his participation. The white-haired soldier also found his daughter, Edith, now fifteen years of age, budding into a beautiful womanhood, and bearing so strong a resemblance to her mother that he gazed at her with mixed emotions of pain ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... strong not to insist on them. See, then, thou hast not too much horror of this; Who that fights well in battle comes home sound?— Much less couldst thou, who must, with seeming weakness, Invite the power of Holofernes forth Ere striking it, thy womanhood the ambush. For thou didst plan, I guess, to duel him In snares, weaving his greed about his limbs, Drawn out and twisted winding round his strength By ministry of thy enticing beauty; That when he thought himself spending on thee Malicious violence, and thou hadst made him Languish, ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... opinion as regards my telling the truth or not? I cannot tell. But I am very miserable! Oh, how unhappy this last year has been! I have passed out of childhood into old age. I have had no youth—no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me—for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same fearful spirit. I am weary of this continual call upon me ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... make over well into rugs, supply heat to the feet, particularly in summer, and to the disposition during the semiannual house cleaning. They also cover a multitude of moths. But they belong to the dark ages of unenlightened womanhood whose chief end was to keep house, and have been jostled into the background by bare floors or mattings, with rugs. Hardwood floors certainly are nice and seem to wear an air of conscious pride of birth, but their humbler self-made brethren of common ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... mystic rite of the Eucharist, knew it not. Not only would she have rejected it with horror, but such a proposition, presented by the guest who had sat at her hearth as the friend and convive of the son upon whose arm and integrity her widowed womanhood relied for solace and protection, would have roused her maternal wits to some sure cunning which would have contravened the crime and sheltered her son from the evil influences and miserable results of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... 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 before her! ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... not matured into womanhood as such girls do. She looks as if her growth in every-day experiences had stopped years ago; that while her body grew older her mind had halted, immature, incomplete. A great grief might have had that effect, or the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... when she had first met Job on that very road. Her black hair was smoothly braided down her back, she wore a light muslin dress tied with a red sash, low shoes took the place of the tan and dust of other days, a neat starched sun-bonnet enfolded her face now showing traces of womanhood near at hand. As she turned the bend of the road, Job stood there leaning on the fence with a far-away look. It was he who was startled this time, as he dropped his elbows and hastened to lift his faded sombrero. It was ...
— The Transformation of Job - A Tale of the High Sierras • Frederick Vining Fisher
... a fascinating age, when an intelligent girl is said to fluctuate between childhood and womanhood. Let me add that these seeming fluctuations depend much on the company she is in: the budding virgin is princess of chameleons; and, to confine ourselves to her two most piquant contrasts, by her mother's side ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... that one should choose this method of doing it. There must be disagreeable details connected with it, embarrassments, absolute indignities: why did they not marry? This woman was good-looking enough. She was very obstinate—almost dictatorial. His idea of womanhood was hopelessly confused with clouds of white tulle, appealing eyes, and a desire for guidance. It was impossible to connect any of these characteristics with the ...
— In The Valley Of The Shadow • Josephine Daskam
... characteristics of his work. Strong and stately, it is a fit receptacle for the spirit of resolution and self-confidence with which he animates it. His Virgins are like goddesses, and seem to typify for him the strength of womanhood. Nowhere do we see nobler beauty than in his angels and archangels. In these "divine birds"[38] he seems to have recognised the ideal of all he strove for, and their wings are symbols to him of swift movement ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... matrimonial alliances, and the standing of both had been elevated by this union of fortunes. In each of these two, there were six or seven children—the most of them boys—but Captain Roberts, the head of the third, had but one child, a daughter, who, in the year named, was approaching womanhood. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... Schorlin understood her and rejoiced to hear the answer. In his eyes, also, Countess Cordula this evening had exceeded the limits even of the liberty which by common consent she was permitted above others. He believed that he had found in Eva the embodiment of pure and beautiful womanhood. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Debray had guessed, she had experienced some secret agitation that she would not acknowledge to any one. Being a man who knew that the former of these symptoms was one of the inherent penalties of womanhood, he did not then press his inquiries, but waited for a more appropriate opportunity when he should again interrogate her, or receive an avowal proprio motu. At the door of her apartment the baroness met Mademoiselle Cornelie, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wishin' more an' more that ye had a ma. I ain't never thought openly on it fur years, not since ye was fust borned. But as ye grow int' womanhood, ye seem as helpless as ye did then. I wish ye ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... very pretty shoulders you have, child! Such women as you, like potatoes, are best au naturel. Now, with those corsets, and this red shawl over the back of your chair, you would make a very good Madonna of the Rubens school. Men's ideal of womanhood then was to be plump, insipid ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately folded leaves, and tender womanhood, shielded by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or other, our American girls often fail to adorn themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... womanhood! Crucified at the stake, while we men play the part of women, for, what can we do?" said Ensal, looking at Earl, tears of pity for his people welling up in his eyes and stealing their way down his ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... 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 and ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... recollection of your warnings and of your distrust of the French character, or possibly it may be from the prejudices of my New England education, but I cannot entertain pleasantly the thought of her growing up to womanhood under the influences which are about her here. What those influences are you will not expect me to explain in detail. I am sure it will be enough to win upon your sympathy to say that they are Popish and thoroughly French. I feel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... conquering arm He seized her and from her brow Tossed back the dripping locks, and sought her lips- Her eyes closed,— As all her body yielded to his kiss. Then home he bore her to the shore, Within his heart a song of triumph; In hers, a new-born joy of womanhood. So spring for ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... channel. The child slipped and fell into the stream. From the open window of the cooper shop Frank heard a scream. He ran down to the canal and pulled her out, and carried her all wet and dripping to the house. From that time he had been restored to favor. He had watched the girl grow up to womanhood in the years following the war, and had been sorry when she became too old to play ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... has done more for the advancement of true womanhood than the Church or any of its accessories."—Dr. Watson, in Banner of Light, ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith
... CHILD When winter sleep is abroad my hair grows thin, My feet unsteady. When the leaves awaken My mother carries me in her golden arms. I will soon put on my womanhood and marry The spirits of wood and water, but who can tell When I was born for the first time? I think I am much older than the eagle cock That blinks and blinks on Ballygawley Hill, And he is the oldest thing ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... time she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so dreadful. It was, perhaps, part ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... literature. But, on whatever seas he sailed, and on whatever shores he wandered, he nursed in his heart a dreadful hate—a hate of the woman who had so cruelly intervened. And, cherishing that hate, his heart became hard and bitter and sour. He lost faith in love, in womanhood, in God, in everything. And his books reflected the cynicism of his soul. This is Rodney Steele as the story opens. The boat-train moves into Charing Cross, and, after an absence of ten years, he finds himself once ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... 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
... would not thrive. Incredible as it may seem, so far was this idea extended, that the great Arabian physician-philosopher, Rhazes, actually included smallpox in this group, as the last of the "crises of growth" which had to appear and have its way in young manhood or womanhood. Quaint little echoes of this simple faith still ring in the popular mind, as, for instance, in the widespread notion about the dangerousness of doing anything to check the eruption in measles and cause it to "strike in." Any mother in Israel ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... sense of religion, with only a fitful tenderness, with years' length between the fits, so fiercely critical, so wholly unradiant of hope, misanthropic, savagely morbid. Yes; there was little Elsie too; it must have been that she was the boy's preserver, being childhood, sisterhood, womanhood, all that there had been for him of human life, and enough—he being naturally of such good stuff—to keep him good. He had lost much, but not all: he was not nearly what he might have been under better auspices; flaws and imperfections there were, in abundance, ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... warning. I wrote down her words and promised to heed them: "Remember, dear, that emotional desire deliberately aroused in 'harmless flirtations' and then deliberately repressed is an offense against womanhood, a menace to the health, and a degradation ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... Piper had passed that period of life popularly known on the Monk Road as the matrimonial age. She had reached that second stage of unwed womanhood when interest in material things supersedes that of sentiment. She no longer sighed as she gazed down the stretch of walk, lined with rose hedge, that led from the verandah of her Cousin James' home to the Monk Road gateway, for there was no one in ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... trustworthy witnesses allege, modern luxury, culture, and love of leisure, have rendered them impatient; while the impossibility of devolving their domestic duties upon servants makes the family a burden, and maternity no longer the deepest instinct and strongest hope of womanhood. He saw no beginning of that manifold change of morals and manners which the survivors of an elder generation now regard with deep dismay. His portrait of Democracy, as seen in New England, is decidedly rose-coloured. He saw enough in the Middle and Southern States of the working of democracy ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... justice, who made us; He must place sin where sin was conceived; We must know if man's God will upbraid us Because we both loved and believed. We must know if man's riches and power, His titles, crowns, sceptres and ermine, Weigh with God against womanhood's dower, Or whether ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... dialogues and monologues of the French domestic stage, than of any work of English or American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treatment of feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numerous types of sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent womanhood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens what Thackeray calls ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... memory, fresh on our ear; We know how a tender-souled woman could master The anguish of horror, the tremor of fear. That short brave defence will long live in our story. That long dreadful march England will not forget; Though womanhood finds little comfort in glory, For hearts that are aching and eyes that ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, June 27, 1891 • Various
... tea quietly, but with a hopeless feeling. He would like to claim that bit of womanhood as his own that moment, and she could talk of five years! It was the clearest possible indication to Peter that Leonore was heart-whole. "No one, who is in love," he thought, "could possibly talk of five years, or five months even." When Peter got back to his chambers that afternoon, he was ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... was not strictly necessary that she should have exceeded by very much the common span. Nonetheless she was very far advanced in life, and her relations with Jeffrey Aspern had occurred in her early womanhood. "That is her excuse," said Mrs. Prest, half-sententiously and yet also somewhat as if she were ashamed of making a speech so little in the real tone of Venice. As if a woman needed an excuse for having loved the divine poet! He had ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... He 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 Prisoner • Alice Brown
... on womanhood, perfect in manner and appearance—as the Ursulines knew well how to train the young olive-plants of the Colony,—walked on demurely enough, looking apparently straight forward, but casting side glances from under their ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and watched the orb that itself, with its members the planets, went a great journey. Gilian began to talk about Elspeth. She talked with quietness, with depth, insight, and love, sitting there on the golden moor. Elspeth—childhood and girlhood and womanhood. The sister of Elspeth spoke simply, but the sifted words came from a poet's granary. She made pictures, she made melodies for Alexander. Glints of vision, fugitive strains of music, echoes of a quaint and subtle mirth, something elemental, faylike—that was Elspeth. And lightning in the ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... her for three years, during which she had sprung up to womanhood, for she was now seventeen, and appeared to be at least eighteen years old. Before, when we were living together, we kissed as brother and sister: since we had again become inmates of the same house, we had been friends, but nothing more. Bessy certainly showed as great ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... To him you are but sovereign, and as such Alone he seeks your welfare; but your rights, Derived from womanhood, this tender point Must be decided by your own tribunal, Not by the statesman; yet e'en policy Demands that you should see her, and allure By such a generous deed the public voice. You can hereafter act as it may please you, To rid you of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... honesty may give him, can do the same. His wife's fortune will consist in the labour of her hands, and in her ability to assist him in his home. But between these there is a middle class of men, who, by reason of their education, are peculiarly susceptible to the charms of womanhood, but who literally cannot marry for love, because their earnings will do no more than support themselves. As to this special young man, it must be confessed that his earnings should have done much more than that; but not the less did he find himself in a position in which marriage with ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... manifestations, appearing in the sweetness and simplicity of a little child, in the fearful tumultuousness of a Lady Macbeth, in the passionate tenderness of a Romeo, or in the Gothic grandeur of a Scotch sorceress,—in the love of kindred, in the fervor of friendship, and in the nobleness of the truest womanhood. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... stale. Himself a second and a yet more fortunate Antony, he has once more laid a world, and a world more wonderful than ever, at her feet. He has put aside for her sake all other forms and figures of womanhood; he, father or creator of Rosalind, of Cordelia, of Desdemona, and of Imogen, he too, like the sun-god and sender of all song, has anchored his eyes on her whom "Phoebus' amorous pinches" could not leave "black," nor "wrinkled deep in time"; on that incarnate and imperishable "spirit of sense," ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Fresh as the wakening morn with violet breath; And every action, look, thought, word, and trace, Were strung to tuneful melody. Her life Was music's echo—stealing o'er the soul Like dying strains, soft and retiringly. In childish grace to womanhood she grew, And like the virgin lily stood and smiled— Flinging around the fragrance of herself Unweeting of ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... that Lady Marian while she shares Our outlaw life in Sherwood shall be called Simply Maid Marian. Thirdly, we that follow Robin, shall never in thought or word or deed Do harm to widow, wife or maid; but hold, Each, for his mother's or sister's or sweetheart's sake, The glory of womanhood, a sacred thing, A star twixt earth and heaven. Fourth, whomsoever Ye meet in Sherwood ye shall bring to dine With Robin, saving carriers, posts and folk That ride with food to serve the market towns Or any, indeed, that ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... appeared in the distance in answer to the call, and came up pale, but looking innocent of having seen a living soul. Mrs. Dornell groaned in spirit at such duplicity in the child of her bosom. This was the simple creature for whose development into womanhood they had all been so tenderly waiting—a forward minx, old enough not only to have a lover, but to conceal his existence as adroitly as any woman of the world! Bitterly did the Squire's lady regret that Stephen Reynard had not been allowed to come to ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... often went to see Tom, but talked to Tom's sister. Many an evening, long after Tom had unceremoniously climbed the rude stairway to bed, would the brown-eyed maid, with her quaint, wistful touch of womanhood, sit beside Dic on the ciphering log inside the fireplace, listening to him read from one of Billy Little's books, watching him trace continents, rivers, and mountains on a map, or helping him to cipher a complicated problem ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... with the dawn of a new era, after a hundred years of education in a republic, she asked more than a simple recognition of the products of her hand and brain; with her growing intelligence, virtue and patriotism, she demanded the higher ideal of womanhood that should welcome her as an equal factor in government, with all the rights and honors of citizenship fully accorded. During the entire century, women who understood the genius of free institutions had ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... you dream what maddening ecstasies, What rich ideals haunt, by day and night, Alone, and in the crowd, even to the death, The servitors of that celestial court Where peerless Mary, sun-enthroned, reigns, In whom all Eden dreams of womanhood, All grace of form, hue, sound, all beauty strewn Like pearls unstrung, about this ruined world, Have their fulfilment and their archetype. Why hath the rose its scent, the lily grace? To mirror forth her loveliness, from whom, Primeval ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... not change; enter thou in, Flower of all sweet and stainless womanhood! For ever to ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... communion with Christ, not to draw attention to Christ's mother. Yet out of those slight, and perhaps almost contemptuous indications, the Middle Ages have made three or four perfect and wonderful types of glorified womanhood: the Mother in adoration, the crowned, enthroned Virgin, the Mater Gloriosa; the broken-hearted Mother, Mater Dolorosa, as found at the foot of the cross or fainting at the deposition therefrom; types more ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... tambour-work,[1] are two words, "Appreciate Time." Under the first four alphabets (there are five in all) comes the date, "September 19, 1823," and in the lower corner another date, "October 24," when the square was completed, with the name of the child who wrought it, long since grown to womanhood, and now nearly forty years dead, but there recorded, in pink silk cross ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... pride—her dear and handsome father! Then she transferred her regard to Margaret Brewster; she had been such a satisfactory friend—why oh, why did she wish to become her step-mother? The twins, with the unerring instinct of womanhood, had decided ten days before that Weller's warning to his son was timely—Mrs. Brewster was a ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... Williams, the club's president, and gave several instances to illustrate it. After the addresses Mrs. Williams presented Miss Anthony with a large bouquet tied with yellow satin ribbon and said: "Flowers in their beauty and sweetness may represent the womanhood of the world. Some flowers are fragile and delicate, some strong and hardy, some are carefully guarded and cherished, others are roughly treated and trodden under foot. These last are the colored women. They have a crown of thorns continually pressed upon ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... been in America for a long time," said Mr. Raleigh, after a few steps. "But I do not doubt that you will find enjoyment there. It will be new: womanhood will have little like youth for you; but, in every event, it is well to add to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... dew is on the rose, and the world is all repose." ... Those rangers lived close to danger and hardships every day, but they had more real sentiment in their makeup than any type of men I know. Maybe it's because women are so scarce around them that they hold all womanhood in high regard. Most of them dreamed of a home and wife and children, but few of them felt they had a right to ask a woman to share their primitive mode of living. They might not jump up to retrieve a dropped handkerchief, or stand at attention when a woman entered a room, but in their hearts they ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... absorbing adoration. What was the drama enacted mattered not,—I had no perception of it, nor of anything except the person who had fascinated me. Tall in figure, commanding in gesture, scarcely developed into the full wealth of womanhood, with an eye of piercing blackness, yet changing with every gradation of passion, profuse black tresses, and a voice whose intonations swayed the audience to every mood of feeling, SHE for the first time appeared ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... be thine to bear Through coming years; For womanhood hath weariness and care, And anxious tears; And they may all be thine, to brand the brow That in its ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously. There had been a little Celia—a red-headed, sulky, mutinous slip of a girl, always at war with her step-mother, and affording no special comfort or hope to the rest ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... own lives in their own community, rehearsing their songs, weaving chaplets of flowers, stringing pearls for their simple costumes, playing games and exchanging the badinage and gossip which are the life-breath of womanhood the world over. They are inordinately proud of their hair, as well they may be, and spend hours at a time dressing and ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... weaker power, and her success will be against the nature of things. Her dishonor lay in her attempt, not in its relinquishment. But we shall fail, not because of mechanics and mathematics, but because our manhood and womanhood weighed in the balance are found wanting. There are few who will not share in the sin. There are none who will not share in the shame. Wives, would you hold back your husbands? Mothers, would you keep your sons? From what? for what? From ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... find the experience particularly edifying. He will note many facts that will depress rather than encourage and inspire. In the throng he will see many men and women, young and old, who, as specimens of physical manhood and womanhood, are far from perfect. He will see many who are young in years but who are old in looks and physical bearing. They creep or shuffle along as if bowed down with the weight of years, lacking the graces ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... with cruelty or shame. Even the German troops under him loved him without bounds. To his companions he gave gifts with such largesse, that his horse and armour were all that at any time he called his own. Beautiful and pure as Sir Galahad, all that was brightest in womanhood watched and ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... the past year of toil. His family may have been industrious in a general way, and yet been consumers only, and not producers. We knew a farmer's family where there were three daughters just budding into womanhood. On inquiring of the mother what she had to sell to clothe her daughters with, she answered, Not a thing. Have you no butter, eggs, fowls, honey, or bees-wax to sell from this good farm? No, nothing. These girls were not idle! Oh no. They pounded the organ, and the ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... in literature, who is at once the manliest of men, and the most womanly of women; who can not only recognize the feminine element in existing individuals, but discern the idea, the pattern, the radiant genius of womanhood itself, as it hovers, unseen to other eyes, over the living representatives of the sex. Literature boasts many eminent female poets and novelists; but not one has ever approached Shakespeare in the purity, the sweetness, the refinement, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... parenthood, also that women are not always the weaker sex. There are 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
... when I rose to leave, Ombos and Margot came out to the front to say good night: my last glimpse, as I walked down the pave street, was of Margot—a bare-headed figure, with wistful grey eyes, calm with the mysterious wisdom of pure womanhood. She waved her dainty lace handkerchief ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... unholy world. As a man shelters a little, flickering flame, hollowing his hands around it to keep it from the wind, as a man screens a flower from the cold, so I have striven to shelter and to screen your life, so that you might come to womanhood in such a fashion—so simple, so pure, so holy—as that in which girls grew to womanhood in the Golden Age. Therefore I did not tell you that Robert the Good was dead; therefore I did not tell you ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and the betrayer is too often the man speaking her own tongue. On this terrible subject the nation, like other nations, is beginning to wake up to its responsibilities in relation to the immigrant girl as in relation to other girls. This special danger to young womanhood is so linked with other social questions that I merely allude to it here, because of the certainty I entertain that much even of this danger would lessen if the trade-union movement among women were so strong and so extensive that any ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... calm. Never before had she felt that dignity of soul, which looks straight into the face of its sorrow and feels itself equal to the bearing of it. She had as yet no idea that during that evening she had passed through that wonderful heart-experience, which suddenly ripens girlhood into womanhood. Indeed, they will be thoughtless girls—whatever their age—who can read this sentence and not pause and recall that marvellous transition in their own lives. To some it comes with a great joy, to others with a great sorrow but it is always a fateful event, and girls should ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... his 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
... is true for men, it is much more true for women. Teach a woman to act from an idea, and you destroy her womanhood for ever. Make a woman self-conscious, and her soul is barren as a sandbag. Why were we driven out of Paradise? Why did we fall into this gnawing disease of unappeasable dissatisfaction? Not because we sinned. Ah, no. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... hiding-place, resolved to share their fortunes. I remained unmolested at the new settlement for some months, labouring hard to prepare a home for my aged parents, who I trusted might be allowed to join me. With them dwelt a young orphan; she had grown up under their roof from infancy to womanhood, and was betrothed to me. During the days of persecution, I could not venture to wed her; but now that they were over, and I had the prospect of being able to prepare a home fit for her reception, I hoped to make her my wife. A peasant can love as well ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... early life, she produced, in 1863, Faith Gartney's Girlhood, which brought her great popularity both at home and in England, where the novel gained especially favorable commendation. Although planned purely as a girl's book, the story of Faith grew into her womanhood, and after the lapse of almost half a century continues to be a prime favorite. It is a purely told story of New England life, especially with dramatic incidents and an ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney |
