Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
- 2 In the Beginning
- 3 Remember, Pregnancy is a State of Health
- 4 Journey into the Unknown
- 5 The Agony and the Ecstasy
- 6 Mother and Baby
- 7 Learning the Language of the Child
- 8 Menus
- 9 Domestic Politics
- 10 Into a Routine
- 11 Lessons Learnt
- 12 Mothers and Medical People
- Endnote – Being Researched
- Notes and References
- Appendix List of Characters
1 - Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- New Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Childbirth and the ‘Position’ of Women
- 2 In the Beginning
- 3 Remember, Pregnancy is a State of Health
- 4 Journey into the Unknown
- 5 The Agony and the Ecstasy
- 6 Mother and Baby
- 7 Learning the Language of the Child
- 8 Menus
- 9 Domestic Politics
- 10 Into a Routine
- 11 Lessons Learnt
- 12 Mothers and Medical People
- Endnote – Being Researched
- Notes and References
- Appendix List of Characters
Summary
… a house without a child is like a garden without a flower, or like a cage without a bird. The love of offspring is one of the strongest instincts implanted in women; there is nothing that will compensate for the want of children. A wife yearns for them; they are as necessary to her happiness as the food she eats and the air she breathes. [A doctor, 1911]
Artificial reproduction is not inherently dehumanizing. At the very least, development of the option should make possible an honest re-examination of the ancient value of motherhood … until the decision not to have children or to have them by artificial means is as legitimate as traditional childbearing, women are as good as forced into their female roles. [A feminist, 1972]
The Institution of Motherhood
Throughout human society childbirth is never just one event in a woman's life. It is always momentous, but in different ways. For culture, the different cultures that human beings have invented as ways of living, defines the meaning of birth, a biological act.
In colonial America, women had twelve or more children; unmarried women in their mid-twenties were economically useless old maids. In Alor, an Indonesian Island, in the 1940s, women's chief role was agricultural work, and men liked babies more than women did. Victorian moralists saw a fully domesticated wife and mother as a sign of a man's social status and a large family as proof of his male power. Yahgan women of Tierra del Fuego go back to work one day or less after having a baby. In England, a woman is paid by the state not to work until her baby is seven weeks old. Jarara women of South America give birth in a domestic passageway or shelter in front of everyone, including small children. In parts of the United States in the 1930s it was against the law for mothers who gave birth in hospital to have their babies with them. Eighty-two per cent of women in a sample of seventy-six cultures gave birth standing up or sitting or squatting, the rest lying down.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- From Here to Maternity (Reissue)Becoming a Mother, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018