Motherhood Quote by Gilbert Parker

A politician writing about birth is never just doing sentiment; he is laundering a theory of society through a domestic image. Gilbert Parker’s line turns motherhood into a second natal event, a reset button with moral and civic implications. The rhetorical trick is the passive inevitability of it: “the mother also is born again.” Not chooses, not grows, not adapts - is born. It frames transformation as natural law, which is exactly the kind of framing that plays well in public life: if change is “nature,” it doesn’t have to be argued as ideology.

The subtext is both elevating and disciplining. On one hand, Parker grants mothers a kind of heroic re-entry into the world: the child’s arrival reorganizes identity, time, and allegiance. On the other, it quietly defines a woman’s “real” second life as beginning with reproduction, not with education, work, or self-authored ambition. That’s a political move in an era when the “maternal” was a major source of social legitimacy - a way to sanctify the private sphere while still extracting public meaning from it.

Context matters: Parker worked in the late Victorian/Edwardian Anglosphere, when empire, nation, and “character” were constantly being preached as inherited duties. This line fits that climate. A new baby isn’t just personal joy; it’s continuity, citizenship-in-the-cradle. The mother is “born again” into responsibility, but also into a story the culture is eager to tell: that the future arrives through her, and therefore she should carry it properly.