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Excerpt from The Endowment of Motherhood When Elizabeth Barrett Browning's baby was born, she received a maternity endowment of a hundred pounds a year. It was the gift of a well-disposed cousin, an elderly bachelor. Though the Brownings were far from poor, the settlement was welcomed, no doubt, as meeting a reasonable need. Certainly it seems only fitting that a well-to-do bachelor should play the part of an economic "uncle" to the next generation. The generosity of childless people toward the children of near relatives and favorite friends strikes one as mere justice and propriety, after all, and such voluntary acts of evening-up between one generation and the next are not at all uncommon among the families and classes who can afford to be kind. It is a commonplace among the rich that children increase expenses. But families who subsist on wages and salaries have no margin, or practically none, on which to draw in this emergency. For, though the birth of children is one of the most familiar facts in nature, it still figures as an emergency in family life and as a shock to the family budget. The children of wage-earners regularly subtract from the standard of comfort in the home. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.