At 8:43 AM 7/11/97, Neil Rest wrote:
>Of course some women would want large numbers of children (without
>estimating how many women that "some" is!). And certainly, many more would
>think about it a little, or fantasize about it some.
I think that the "wanting vast #'s of children" is largely an historical
artifact born (gg) of the necessity, until recently, to raise big families
in order for them to defend the homestead/do the farming/survive to take care of
the parents in their old age. Now that large families tend to = large
expenditures of family income + environmental capital some of that atti-
tude is dying away in rich countries. It's also a new thing for many
women to actually have a) access to pretty reliable birth control and b)
work on which they can support themselves. This makes being "a good
breeder" and a good, stable, devoted mom who is happy raising kids just an
option
instead of the only approved game in town.
Give us another generation or two of these new conditions (spreading
and improving, I hope), and we may begin to get some idea of the porpor-
tion of women who come to big-family attitudes out of genuine autonomous
desire rather than cultural pressures that are economic at base. Betcha
it boils down to a lot fewer young women than our current frantically pro-
baby culture dreams of (we are in the throes of terror about a rapidly
"graying" population; guess who's assigned the job of fixing this, at what-
ever personal sacrifice). The fact that so many young women already
postpone or eschew pregnancy to work at jobs that are *not* well paid or
all that great in terms of status and advancement suggests the baby-maker
model as a default setting for a majority of women rather than a positive
choice: if that's the behavior that society validates in us, that's what
most of us will do if we can. No mystery about it, and not much biology,
either.
If as an author I were writing a major female character with a
fierce case of baby-lust in a future human society, I would want to place
that character's attitudes in this (extrapolated) context of birth control
and life-work alternatives. Or else I would include hints of how birth con-
trol and interesting, decently-paid, outside-the-home work for women
disappeared again after surfacing in the 20th century wealthy West.
I should add that my daughter-in-law wanted four kids -- a
large family by modern American professional-class standards -- because
she was one of four siblings and she had a very happy childhood, which
she wishes to pass on -- to duplicate? -- for children of her own. An
opposite condition -- that of having a childhood that leaves a girl
desperate for somebody to really love her even if she has to literally
create that somebody in her own body -- can also motivate girls
to want baby after baby, if the reports of social workers and psychologists
are to be believed. These kinds of situations strike me as plaus-
ible background for such a desire; the idea that "girls just want to have
kids" does not.
I'm sure, by the way, that Bujold intends no such implication in her
work. But leaving baby-lust unexamined in a future society does inevitably
raise the question for readers educated about overpopulation and women's
rights. "Baby lust" is a phrase borrowed from a woman of my acquaintance who
only gave up her insistence of having at least one child of her own when
she was diagnosed with CFS and realized the impracticality of this desire
in her specific case.
Suzy
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:25 PDT