Motherhood Quote by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Motherhood here isn’t framed as comfort-on-demand; it’s framed as engineering. Dorothy Canfield Fisher slips a quiet provocation into what looks like a sentimental line: the best maternal love is measured not by how often a child collapses into it, but by how rarely they need to. The punch of the phrasing comes from its pivot on “lean.” First, it conjures the familiar image of a mother as emotional furniture - reliable, supportive, indefinitely available. Then Fisher yanks that image away. A mother, she argues, shouldn’t be a permanent crutch; she should be the force that makes crutches obsolete.

The subtext is both feminist and disciplined. Fisher wrote across a period when “good mothering” was often defined as self-erasure and constant sacrifice, especially for middle-class women whose social worth was tethered to domestic devotion. Her line refuses that martyr script. It implies a mother has a job beyond soothing: to cultivate competence, judgment, and inner ballast. The mother’s success is paradoxical: she becomes most vital by making herself less necessary.

The misspelling (“unnessary”) almost adds to the effect, as if the thought mattered more than polish - a practical credo, not a decorative maxim. Read in its early-20th-century context of Progressive-era faith in education and character-building, the quote doubles as a social program: raise citizens who can stand upright without constant rescue. It’s affection with an exit strategy.