Faith & Spirit Quote by Helen Hunt Jackson

Jackson frames motherhood as an economy with a divine tariff: it is "priced / Of God", set so high that any attempt to bargain it down becomes not just rude but sacrilegious. The line works because it takes a role routinely treated as private labor and drags it into the register of public moral accounting. "Price" is a sharp word choice in a 19th-century culture obsessed with respectability and duty; it suggests measurable cost while refusing measurability. You can feel the tension between what motherhood extracts and what society prefers to romanticize.

The gendered jab is deliberate. "No man may dare / To lessen or misunderstand" reads like a courtroom warning aimed at male lawmakers, ministers, editors, and husbands - the people empowered to define women from the outside. Jackson isn't merely praising mothers; she is policing the terms of interpretation. Men can admire from a safe distance, but they are disqualified from minimizing it, and even from misreading it. The couplet implies that misunderstanding isn't innocent; it's a form of theft.

Context matters: Jackson wrote in an era that idolized domestic womanhood while restricting women's legal and economic agency. By sanctifying motherhood, she deploys the dominant moral language of her time as leverage, turning piety into a protective shield. It's a strategic elevation: if society won't pay mothers materially, it must at least pay them in reverence - and keep its hands off the valuation.