Perfect Motherhood

Independent thought, that which dares to question existing beliefs and methods of action, has wondrous vitality; otherwise progress would be impossible, as each new idea is forced to walk through the fiery furnace of intense opposition—of hatred.

———

"I wonder if slick-tongued politicians would fool us as they do if everybody was taught to really think?"

———

"The system of society that forces people to adopt all sorts of expedients in order to get bread is not the best calculated to develop integrity."

———

"...no man living can feel a woman's sorrow at the wreck of her child as a woman can—no man can feel the horror of enforced, unwelcome motherhood as woman can."

Here is another extensively quotable novel from my favorite radical feminist storyteller, Lois Waisbrooker. While I don't consider it to be as well written as Helen Harlow's Vow, nonetheless Perfect Motherhood is a excellent story, much of which deals with the economic traps into which people may fall, from farmers to tenement dwellers, a topic which is continued in The Wherefore Investigating Company. But as loosely as the book is written*, all of the episodes support the central theme that the quality of humanity depends upon the quality of motherhood.

[*There is one scene involving a phrenologist, which I would just as soon have left out.]

The text is from this scan of the 1890 edition. I corrected any obvious typographical errors, and updated a few obsolete or inconsistent spellings, such as "goslins" to "goslings" and "Mab" to "Meb."

So here it is: the master HTML version, the home-brew Kindle version, and the actual Amazon publication.

March 30, 2025

————

Appendix

Here is my transcription of "Economic Science" [1875], by Joel Densmore, which not only contains an introduction by Lois Waisbrooker, but also influenced her subsequent writing.

ffred's nearly-forgotten treasures