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.

he employed a German governess for his first two sons, Freddie and Charles.

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

Widowed at twenty-two, Laura had one daughter, Peggy, to whom she devoted her life. When Peggy was sixteen, she confided to her mother that she was pregnant and that the lover who had promised to marry her had deserted her. “Well-meaning friends” advised an abortion and told Smith, “There is a way. Hide this thing from sight, send her on a journey.