Motherhood Quote by Margaret Cavendish

A haloed sentence like this is doing damage control as much as it is doing praise. Cavendish reaches for the language of care - sickness, recovery, “not sparing any cost” - to cast her mother’s household rule as morally serious. But the key word is “mistress,” a term that makes the power structure impossible to sentimentalize. Benevolence here is not equality; it is governance.

Cavendish, writing from within the English gentry world, knows the household is a political unit in miniature. Servants are labor, but they are also dependents whose well-being reflects the household’s honor. The insistence on medical expense is telling: health is the moment when service breaks down, when a worker’s body refuses to be purely instrumental. By foregrounding nursing and cost, she reframes mastery as stewardship, a way of making hierarchy feel like obligation rather than exploitation.

The subtext is anxious and strategic. In the 17th century, “good” authority was expected to be paternal (or here, maternal) and visibly charitable; cruelty signaled disorder, impiety, even poor breeding. Cavendish’s choice to spotlight care for servants isn’t just a private memory. It is a public credential, burnishing a family’s virtue in a culture where reputation traveled as gossip and patronage. The sentence performs what it describes: it takes the harsh reality of dependence and wraps it in the rhetoric of moral costliness, turning power into proof of character.