Towering mothers

... the baffled lady-mother left (unceremoniously) full of towering and demonstrative rage....  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border March 1853; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army. 

Then, high-up, and towering, and all-forbidding before Pierre grew the before unthought of wonderful edifice of his mother's immense pride;—her pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all the pride of high-born, refined, and wealthy Life, and all the Semiramian pride of woman. 

--Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities, 1852.