Motherhood Quote by William Standish Knowles

It reads like a tidy family anecdote, but it’s really a miniature origin story about how status gets assigned long before a person chooses a life. Knowles isn’t just describing two parents with different interests; he’s sketching two competing moral economies. His father’s view of “business” as the “highest calling” frames work as vocation in the Protestant-capitalist sense: building, selling, organizing, winning. His mother’s elevation of “medicine” places the pinnacle elsewhere: expertise yoked to public service, the idea that a profession earns honor by reducing suffering.

The sentence is engineered for contrast. “Highest calling” carries quasi-religious weight, suggesting business as a kind of secular priesthood. “Top profession” sounds more practical, even ranked, like a league table of social usefulness. That difference in diction is the subtext: one parent speaks in absolutes of purpose, the other in hierarchies of merit. The structure also avoids choosing a side outright. Knowles, a scientist, lands in the third lane: not commerce, not clinical care, but a discipline that borrows legitimacy from both. Science can be framed as discovery with downstream healing benefits; it can also be tethered to industry and applied results.

Context matters. For a 20th-century American scientist who helped shape modern chemistry, this is a nod to the era’s core tension: the rising prestige of professionalized expertise (medicine, research) alongside the cultural dominance of business as national religion. It’s less a private memory than a quiet explanation of how ambition is inherited as an argument.