Jan Barger writes:
>
>She is talking about how in days gone by, many children died, and says, "Did
>parents hold back from intimacy until the hcildren had survived those early,
>precarious years?  How did a woman fell, knowing that if she had eight or ten
>or twelve children she'd be lucky if she raised half of them?

In much of the world, this is *still* the case, not just "in days gone by."
I've written about this in my book "Dancing Skeletons."  These women (in
Mali, West Africa) grow up experiencing the death of children all around
them -- their siblings, their cousins, their neighbors, their playmates.
Everyone *knows* that children don't necessarily grow up.  But rather than
distancing themselves from the intimacy because it would hurt too much, they
do just they opposite -- they enjoy their babies, as babies, to the maximum
extent possible.  They love them to distraction, nurse them on demand, carry
them everywhere, play with them all the time, sleep with them, etc.  They
know that they may very well have only a few weeks, months, or years, with
their child.  They lavish affection and intimacy on them.


So, I think she's (Madeleine l'Engle) a little off track here.  It was
usually upper-class women in north and western Europe who thought that
breastfeeding was disgusting and dirty, cow-like, peasant-like, etc., and
who therefore employed wet nurses.  And in those places where wet nurses
were common, children were treated like commodities -- heirs, for example --
rather than as living breathing human beings to love and cherish.  The focus
in those societies was on the husband-wife bond, not the mother-child bond,
and the upper class woman had to be "free" to help her husband, entertain,
schmooze with other high-society ladies, etc.  She didn't have time for the
mundane tasks of childrearing, which were greatly devalued, so she foisted
them off on slaves or servants.  This is just the opposite of most of human
prehistory and history, and most of the world today, where childrearing is
still regarded as *the most important thing a woman does with her life."

Whaddya think??

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Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.                         email: [log in to unmask]
Anthropology Department                               phone: (409) 845-5256
Texas A&M University                                    fax: (409) 845-4070
College Station, TX  77843-4352