Judy C. wrote:
>I couldn't imagine how a mother would WANT to send
>her son off to a possible death ( you might accept it, but I can't imagine
>"wanting", but when I realized that very few noblewomen raised their own
>children and almost no one ever breastfed, I understood how they could feel
>so cut off.

Having only one son myself, I've often wondered the same thing.  Here's
Shakespeare's take on it, in Coriolanus, which is set in Rome in the 5th
centruy BC.

VOLUMNIA ( Coriolanus' mother)   When yet he was but tender-bodied and the
only son of my womb, when youth with comeliness plucked all gaze his way,
when for a day of kings' entreaties a mother should not sell him an hour from
her beholding, I, considering how honour would become such a person--that it
was no better than, picture-like, to hang by th' wall if renown made it not
stir--was pleased to let him seek danger where he was like to find fame.  To
a cruel war I sent him, from whence he returned his brows bound with oak.  I
tell thee, daughter, I sprang not more in joy at first hearing he was a
man-child than now in first seeing he had proved himself a man.

VIRGILIA (his wife)   But had he died in the business, madam, how then?

VOLUMNIA   Then his good report should have been my son.  I therein would
have found issue.  Hear me profess sincerely: had I a dozen sons, each in my
love alike, and none less dear than thine and my good Martius', I had rather
had eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of
action.

(Later)
VOLUMNIA   .....The breast of Hecuba when she did suckle Hector looked not
lovelier  than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood at Grecian swork,
contemning.

VOLUMNIA (to her son)   They valiantness was mine, thou sucked'st it from me.

BF doesn't seem to have made her a warm and nurturing person, does it?.  But
she had a different agenda altogether---I think the old-fashiioned Freudian
diagnosis might have been a severe case of penis envy.

I read somewhere, a long time ago, that primitive cultures that practiced
abrupt weaning at or before the age of six months tended to be warlike, while
those that practiced extended nursing and gradual weaning tended to be
peaceable.  Kathy D., do you know how true this is?

Judy Dunlap, RNC, BA, IBCLC