Quotes About Motherhood

Feminism or the family? Carried to excess maybe. I have insisted that women cannot be defined solely in those terms. But for a great many women - not all, because we are only beginning to realize and affirm the diversity of women themselves - choosing motherhood makes motherhood itself a liberating choice.

With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its methods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.

On the Upper East Side, women are prisoners to the ideology of intensive motherhood, which is that you should be enriching your child's well-being on every measure you possibly can at every moment. So when your kid is sitting down playing with Legos, intensive motherhood dictates that you should be engaging with him or her somehow, praising, questioning, making it into a learning opportunity. It's not enough to just tell your child, "Do your homework." It's not enough to help with the homework. You go to the school and learn how they do math, so that you can tutor your child in math.

Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren’t commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.

Motherhood is not for the faint-hearted. Frogs, skinned knees, and the insults of teenage girls are not meant for the wimpy.

I just think motherhood made me better, I think it rejuvenates you as a person, mind, body and spirit, and I think every woman is different.

There are some universal elements when it comes to motherhood - especially for Black moms. Black women are selfless. Many women think of their children before they think about themselves.

People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.

People expect you to change when you become a mother, and of course my priorities changed when I had Violet. She's number one in my life and the best thing that ever happened to me, but I still have fun. I am still myself, but that is made out to seem like I am rebelling against motherhood.

Motherhood was my career. I'm totally satisfied with that.

When children are little, they really need you in one way. When they're bigger, they need you as a friend. And balancing motherhood and career makes you both a better mother and a better businesswoman.

I realized that so much of the pressure I was feeling was from outside sources, and I knew I wasn't ready to take that step into motherhood. [...] Being a biological mother just isn't part of my experience this time around.

It's the curse of motherhood. You're required to love us even when we vex you.

I honestly wondered how on earth I would manage to combine work and motherhood.

You don't take a class; you're thrown into motherhood and learn from experience.

Feminists have mocked full-time motherhood as silly and old fashioned. Maybe they're right. I mean, what do moms do really?

The most consistent gift and burden of motherhood is advice.

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure so I went to medical school. But after practicing medicine for a few years, while raising two sons (with a husband who was also a doctor) I realized that combining medicine with motherhood was more of a challenge than I could handle. So I left medicine and stayed home. And that's when I once again picked up the pen and began to write.

No one who traces the history of motherhood, of the home, of child-rearing practices will ever assume the eternal permanence of our own way of institutionalizing them.

I won't lie to you, fatherhood isn't easy like motherhood.

I think there are few films out there that take motherhood seriously.

Motherhood is wonderful, but it's also hard work. It's the logistics more than anything. You discover you have reserves of energy you didn't know you had.

Motherhood is so honorable a thing that nothing - no convention - can possibly make it dishonorable; and from the standpoint of the right of the child . . . the unmarried mother should be granted by society the same reverence and regard as the married mother.

My music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me - the humiliation of it - as a soprano.These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.

A "snapshot" feature in USA Today listed the five greatest concerns parents and teachers had about children in the '50s: talking out of turn, chewing gum in class, doing homework, stepping out of line, cleaning their rooms. Then it listed the five top concerns of parents today: drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, suicide and homicide, gang violence, anorexia and bulimia. We can also add AIDS, poverty, and homelessness. . . . Between my own childhood and the advent of my motherhood--one short generation--the culture had gone completely mad.

Honestly, on so many levels, I feel like motherhood has prepared me even better for directing than film school because all it is is troubleshooting and dealing with different personalities and emotions and trying to make everybody happy and at the end of the day reaching your own personal goals and agendas.

Women wear many hats in their lives. Daughter, sister, student, breadwinner. But no matter where we are or what we’re doing, one hat that moms never take off is the crown of motherhood. There is no crown more glorious.

There is a lot of healing going on. Really! More people are vegetarians, more are in the green movement, more of us are tearing down the old paradigms and embracing same-sex marriage, single motherhood, men raising babies.

I surely know that there is no role in life more essential and more eternal than that of motherhood.

It's really hard to find things that are worth leaving them for. [Balancing work and motherhood is] really hard. One night in Nashville, my son was screaming with a terrible stomachache. I was like, 'I have to get out of here!' but we had to finish. My friend Jenno, a mother of three who was producing, was great, reminding me that nine times out of 10, they just have gas.

But the truth is I wanted to have my daughter for so long. It's not the kind of thing you can visit, motherhood. Especially in the early years. Now she's eight, and I'm still not going to go anywhere.

God intended motherhood to be a relay race. Each generation would pass the baton on to the next.

There's people constantly asking you for something on set, so the multi-tasking of motherhood transfers very well to being a director. And I think you're compassionate.

It [motherhood] has changed absolutely everything. I mean, it's changed my life. I think I've changed as a human being more since I've had Kai than in any other period in my life...It's such an incredible catalyst for growth. I found myself questioning absolutely everything: how I spend my time, how I speak, what kind of projects I work on, how I look at the world.

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, Wal-Mart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola.

What culture worth the name would deny women the right to safe motherhood? What value system would send young people ignorant into the world, when a little knowledge might save their lives?