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.