Customer Reviews

Mother

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This was a very heart-stirring book for me. When I reached the end, I found myself weeping. I subsequently gave the book to a friend, who found it so inspiring that she is afraid to loan it out to others for fear it will get lost and she will no longer have it in her possession. We believe it is a book that all young women should be required to read.

Kathleen Norris, the California author who wrote some 75 novels between the two world wars, was the Danielle Steele of her day. "Mother" was her first novel which celebrated the sacrifice of motherhood, made her an instant celebrity, and earned her a personal visit from then president Theodore Roosevelt. Related to such literary greats as Frank Norris and the Benet family and moving with the prominent authors, musicians, actors,and journalists of the times she nevertheless wrote of women who overcame the odds of poverty, unfortunate marriages and families, and circumstance to find "love, work, and service," Norris' mantra for a happy life. In spite of a real touch with the nuance of romance, wealth and celebrity, Norris always remained true to her Catholic faith and saw life as a series of choices. She believed that there must be real gold beneath the glitter. She received heavy mail from woman who, like her heroines, felt caught in circumstances of life that seemed hopelessly limiting and insufferable. She was a great stylist and scholar. After reading Kathleen Norris other romance writers seem insipid. Her many novels crowd rare and out-of-print stores, but she needs to be revived (she was heavily reprinted in the 70's in paperback).
Note: I am referring to the Kathleen Norris that lived between 188? and 1968. There is an author writing currently by that name as well.

I happened on this book in my husband's grandfather's barn. I read it and felt a kinship with the mother depicted in this great story of family life. Motherhood entails small sacrifices that bring great reward. This story will warm and strengthen mothers around the world now as I am sure it did when it was first published.

I found this book on my grandmother's shelf and couldn't put it down! The story is a great one, of the joy and happiness of family life and what blessings can come when we are serving those we love. I was inspired by this book and given a new determination to do what is really important in life: raise a good family and love them. So often the responsibilities of motherhood are degraded in our society, yet we end up finding that careers and worldly success don't bring the joy that family does. This book illlustrates that so well! What an inspiring story; a real feel-good book! Please reprint!!!!

A touching story of a young girl who goes into the world to find what her heart desires. She is rather selfish, and scorns the poor women who stay at home, spending their time on their families. In the end, she realizes that really wants to be a loving, Godly wife and mother, like her own mother. When I began this book, I was a bit sceptical. I thought, "This isn't the type of girl I would want to emulate, or bother reading about." But I cried at the end, and highly recommend this book.

This book is a wonderful indictment of the ever-strengthening trend of modern day selfishness exalted in consumerism and the fascination with wealth and leisure.

The praises of motherhood are sung, especially motherhood which embraces large families for the simple reason that children are blessings. Thankfully, the Nancy Campbell-style legalism (which many believe COMMANDS women to get up off their birthing beds, wake up their husbands and get to work on the next baby) is avoided entirely. "And the Lord BLESSED them...." How did He bless them? With fertility and children. Look up Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 9:1 and decide for yourself. No doubt children are blessings and no doubt having a large family is a wonderful, wonderful blessing to which I can attest (I have five children and would love to have more). However, the emphasis here is upon the reasons children are blessings - to one another and also to their parents who are given opportunity to live a life of selfless giving.

The end of the book appropriately contrasts the impact of the life lived in the light of death. The daughter/protagonist of the virtuous mother has worked for a wealthy, self-absorbed woman whose life is "busy," but with details which hold no eternal weight. The other woman, the protagonist's mother, has spent her life in selfless service to her beloved husband and many children. She is happy and content in this, having learned the secret to happiness is living a life in service to others. Although neither woman has died, the daughter/ protagonists imagines the funerals of her mother and her employer in her mind. She then comes to the inexorable conclusion that her wealthy employer would not truly be missed, by her wealthy socialite friends, her husband, or even by her own children. She is not central to their lives or well-being, having abandoned her opportunity to invest herself in them. The book is encouraging and inspiring to those whose vision of selfless parenting is under attack.

Kathleen Norris was an excellent writer, but there appear to be two. One reader earlier commented on this. You need to differentiate between these two authors. The earlier one died in the sixties and didn't write on religious themes.

"To be encouraged to ask for a favor and then refused it," Kathleen Norris wrote, "is an experience all impoverished friends of all comfortably rich persons know. 'You taught me first to bed, and now--you teach me how a beggar should be answered,' says Shakespears's Portia. But it is not only the poor who feels life's endless snubs; they are no respectors of persons." Norris writes about the genesis of MOTHER in her 1959 autobiography FAMILY GATHERING. As a staunch Roman Catholic she and her husband, the brother of the late San Francisco novelist Frank (McTEAGUE) Norris, were appalled by the spread of the birth control movement in the first decade of the century, and she wrote MOTHER hoping to raise the self-image of women who chose to become mothers, and to a certain extent it worked. Former President Theodore Roosevelt named it as one of his favorite books, and honored the impecunious, Bohemian couple by showing up at ther flat for an impromptu dinner. With growing celebrity she became intimate friends with the Lunts, Noel Coward, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Addison and Wilson Mizner, and other famous people of the day.

Her friendship with fellow pop novelist Edna Ferber came to a bad end. Ferber could never forgive Norris for going to Germany in the 1930s and accepting the honors bestowed on her by a grateful Adolf Hitler. Norris returned from Berlin to find that her public had largely deserted her due to her Nazi connections. She wasn't really a Nazi, just a Pacifist and you might say an isolationist, like Charles Lindbergh (another of her friends) and like Lindbergh her once proud name was stained with Nazi obloquy. Yet she was a talented novelist and it's a sign of the times that she is so forgotten today and another woman with the same name is reaping the rewards of having a name people think they've already heard. MOTHER, a tract against what she called "race suicide," is one of her very best novels.

Someone recommended this novel on one of the h.s. websites and it was excellent. It was written in 1911 and it could have been written today - the issues about having only 2 children - or no children - women working, needing to provide your children with EVERYTHING if you are going to have them, it went on and on. The arguments of today for not having children were the same as 100 years ago! I was surprised.

The Mother in question is s/t looked down upon as being a drudge/ servant with no rewards, and people wonder how she could stand having 7 children. This is what mom thought: She welcomed the fast-coming babies as gifts from God, marvelled over their tiny perfectness, dreamed over the soft relaxed forms with a heart almost too full for prayer. She was in a word, old fashioned, hopelessly out of the modern current of thoughts and events. She secretely regarded her children as marvellous, even while she laughed down their youthful conceit and punished their naughtiness.

The story deals with the 20 smthg daughter who wants to be wealthy and limit her kids. By the end of the story she realizes that if her mother subscribed to her weatlhy friends' attitudes, she wouldn't be here. "And she had s/t wished that she and Bruce had been the only ones! Yes, came the sudden thought, but it wldn't have been Bruce and Margaret after all, it would have been Bruce and Charlie. That was what women did, then, when they denied the right of life to the distant, unwanted, possible little person!" and it goes on and on and I loved it : )

It is a beautifully written story, easy to read. I was concerned that it would be too preachy, but it isn't. I didn't want to put it down.

This woman wrote over 50 books, but this is the only one still in the Los Angeles library system.

I think Doug Phillips' (of Vision Forum Ministries) quote applies here:

The Bible calls debt a curse and children a blessing. But in our
culture, we apply for a curse and reject a blessing. Something is
terribly wrong with this picture.

This book "Mother", so beautifully worded, nicely packaged, and handily edited via the Vision Forum company, is at heart an old-fashioned scare tactic for the first-wave feminists that's been resurfaced by new feminist-haters. It's very possible that Jennie Chancey, who modestly calls herself the "editor" of this book and is a fellow heroine of the Vision Forum, edited this book to cut the anti-career message even closer, but from what I saw in the original edition, she didn't have to do much.

Kathleen Norris has a beautiful way with words, a literary pen that sings with an antiquated melody, so it almost surprises me that the stigma of this flowery book is rather remarkably shallow. I'd read from a dozen people that this book was lovely, moving, and by all accounts didn't seem to be anything more than a story about a woman who realized her heart's dream was to be like her beloved mother. I heard this report so many times, even the brand that the Vision Forum attempted to put on this book didn't faze me. But Kathleen Norris, who wrote this around the time when women dared to see themselves as more than wombs, clearly meant it as a smear campaign against such women, and not a very deep one at that. In this brief book, the heroine Margaret, simple-minded to a fault, abandons all thoughts and seeming respect of her mother's lifestyle and goes on a merry-go-round me-search for success and a job, which resembles a teenager's confused attempt to ditch home more than a rational grown woman's attempt to find her place in the world. Then, after a period of time spent with a discontent family and a marriage proposal, she completes her apparent addiction to single-mindedness and realizes she really wanted to be a wife all along. She then gigglingly retires to her room and spends the next three or four pages mentally doodling her future "Mrs. So-and-so" name on the small walls of her skull. But it's not all pink doilies and Mrs. monikers now, dear reader; during this time of high self-congratulation, she spares a few paragraphs to dwell on the poor, unloved career women she's met. All of the women with jobs that she knows, apparently without exception, march sadly through her head being branded, one by one, by the ignorant Margaret as women who are discontent and unloved. She calls all her own former plans for a job fruitless and her sister's former dreams "idle" and indicates they were flimsy thoughts of youth, happily abandoned for her husband as soon as she got married. In case all of this hasn't chilled the heart of any potential feminist yet, author Norris slides the cold knife in completely by painting morbid thoughts in Margeret's head of funerals, the future funerals of her own former employer and every career woman she knows; funerals in which these women are apparently, by and large, unloved and unmourned by those who knew them. And why? Because they didn't choose to be mothers.

The message of this book could hardly be clearer, and rather than heartwarming it is coldly judgemental, cruel, and even heartbreaking at times. The Vision Forum has long written a death sentence for women who don't fit their views of womanhood, but to find this seemingly sweet little book promoting the same message and being deceptively praised by many for it is far more disturbing to me. There are far better and far more worthy ways to praise motherhood, and doing so at the expense of women who don't choose it only narrows it and lessens the beauty of it. If you want a book which truly portrays a good woman, a genuine life search, and the complexity of human beings and our God, I highly recommend "Not My Will", by Francena Arnold.

Another interesting thing about Kathleen Norris worth noting is that, according to another reviewer here, she accepted an award from Hitler. For what, I don't know, but the current thought appears to be that she was a pacifist, not a Nazi. For a woman labeled as a pacifist, it's quite sad to me that she couldn't treat career women with more neutrality, or dare I say kindness. I guess she had the same build that so many "submissive" women have: a soft surface that hides the sharpened claws within.