Sublime

For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened—one of these young women bore a child.

Here at last was Motherhood, and though it was not for all of them personally, it might—if the power was inherited—found here a new race.

First this was merely the hope of bearing better ones, and then they recognized that however the children differed at birth, the real growth lay later—through education.

And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them—all girls.

The Diary of Anaïs Nin—five

Marie Souvestre, the founder and headmistress, was the daughter of the French philosopher and novelist Émile Souvestre. A committed feminist, she believed passionately in educating women to think for themselves, to challenge accepted wisdom, and to assert themselves. These were subversive doctrines to patriarchal Victorians, yet Allenwood succeeded

There you have the start of Herland! One family, all descended from one mother! She lived to a hundred years old; lived to see her hundred and twenty-five great-granddaughters born; lived as Queen-Priestess-Mother of them all; and died with a nobler pride and a fuller joy than perhaps any human soul has ever known—she alone had founded a new race!

Hawaiian women thus bore the responsibility of reproducing national knowledge

All mothers in that land were holy.