unmother

unmother

English

Etymology

un- +‎ mother

Noun

unmother (plural unmothers)

1. A woman who is not a mother.
   • 1946, Sheila Wingfield, Beat Drum, Beat Heart, page 71:

     How we lace away The hours interminable, Intricate and Pale, we nuns And all such unmothers of men;

   • 1998, Ellen Cole, ‎Janet M. Wright, ‎Esther D Rothblum, Lesbian Step Families: An Ethnography of Love, page 11:

     There is experimentation with sexuality, monogamy and nonmonogamy, mothers and "unmothers," parenting by groups of bilogical and/or fictive kins, living in separate households and coparenting, etc.

   • 2015, Jessica Knoll, Luckiest Girl Alive:

     So there are mothers and unmothers, and while neither choice is the easy one to make, motherhood is at least the comfortable one.

Verb

unmother (third-person singular simple present unmothers, present participle unmothering, simple past and past participle unmothered)

1. To cause to cease being a mother; to kill or otherwise remove (a mother's) children.
   • 1640, Ovid, ‎Edward Alliston, Ovids Festivalls: Or Romane Calendar - Issue 2, page 33:

     One day modi mother and unmothered. True twinnes in birth and death ; together drown in this sad stream.

   • 1823, Sophocles, The Tragedies of Sophocles - Volume 2, page 195:

     My father is departed, I with thee am fallen — thyself art dead and gone : but our foes laugh ; and our unmothered mother is frantic with delight; on whom thou oftentimes wouldst send me word in secret that thou wert on the point thyself to come an avenger.

   • 1966, Cyril Tourneur, ‎Lawrence J. Ross, The Revenger's Tragedy, page 34:

     I e'en quake to proceed, my spirit turns edge, I fear me she's unmother'd; yet I'll venture.

   • 1999, Anglistica - Volume 3, page 97:

     The dead daughter presents the already complex mother/daughter relation and unveils in it the (abject?) desire to unmother: in Beloved, the killing of the daughter is done to free her from a future of slavery, and in this it discloses another story,

2. To cause to cease having a mother or to fail to mother properly.
   • 1952, William Goyen, Ghost and flesh: stories and tales, page 132:

     Whatever keeps me from my beginnings, whatever chops me off and isolates me from my whole life is to the harm of my spirit; it unmothers me; it dispossesses me of my heritage and of my truth, and how can I pass on what is mine if I have not received what was others' and passed on to me? he thought.

   • 2006, Lorrie Goldensohn, Dismantling Glory:

     In his poems, Jarrell can finesse the emotional trauma of having been unmothered by a mother who betrayed him both with a divorce and with a displacing younger brother, by now being the mother in the domain of his poetry, wholly on his own terms.