Motherhood
While still at David Kibler's, Bethany became a mother with her first child, Charlotte, and immediately began to worry about being separated from her. She writes:
My dear white lady, in your pleasant home made joyous by the tender love of husband and children all your own, you can never understand the slave mother's emotions as she clasps her new-born child, and knows that a master's word can at any moment take it from her embrace; and when, as was mine, that child is a girl, and from her own experience she sees its almost certain doom is to minister to the unbridled lust of the slave-owner, and feels that the law holds over her no protecting arm, it is not strange that, rude and uncultured as I was, I felt all this, and would have been glad if we could have died together there and then.
She tried to find a new location away from Master Kibler. She explored her options through Miss Lucy and found someone to buy her – a local man named John Prince (Printz).
Read more about this topic: Bethany Veney
Famous quotes containing the word motherhood:
“I guess what I’ve really discovered is the humanizing effect of children in my life—stretching me, humbling me. Maybe my thighs aren’t as thin as they used to be. Maybe my getaways aren’t as glamorous. Still I like the woman that motherhood has helped me to become.”
—Susan Lapinski (20th century)
“The only thing that seems eternal and natural in motherhood is ambivalence.”
—Jane Lazarre (20th century)
“At first, it must be remembered, that [women] can never accomplish anything until they put womanhood ahead of wifehood, and make motherhood the highest office on the social scale.”
—“Jennie June” Croly 1829–1901, U.S. founder of the woman’s club movement, journalist, author, editor. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, pp. 24-5 (January 1870)