SMCharnas suggests that
>the "wanting vast #'s of children" is largely an historical
>artifact born (gg) of the necessity, until recently, to raise big
>families
Large families (pre mid-C19th) were largely not a matter of choice, though
there is fairly strong evidence that, in certain cultures--C18th France in
particular--family sizes were being restricted for economic reasons (across
the board, class-wise, so that inheritances would not be split up). (France
from the C18th is a fascinating example of official and societal pro-natalism,
while individual couples were in fact choosing to have very small families).
The current situation of women delaying having children/having small
families, etc, is also to a large extent economics-driven.
On the 'naturalness' of motherhood I recommend V Fildes 'Breasts Bottles and
Babies' (about breast-feeding, use of wet-nurses, bottle-feeding etc, over
many centuries and how little the modern model of biological mother-child
bonding is 'natural' in the sense of always having been the case), and A
Dally's 'Inventing Motherhood'.
Having said this, my own sense about this is that (speaking from work done as
an historian of sexuality) having found that sexual behaviour is to some
extent, but not entirely, affected by wider social/cultural factors (e.g. the
persistence of certain kinds of sexual behaviour from premarital sex to
homosexuality, in societies in which they are not approved and often severely
penalised), I'd argue that the same is probably true for the parental, esp,
maternal 'instinct'. One thing I found odd in Mitchison's 'Solution Three'
when reflecting on it recently, was that she assumed (possibly as part of the
'thought experiment' she was making) that by promoting same-sex love as
society's ideal desires for parenthood would vanish except among the small
remaining group of recalcitrant heterosexuals. This may be because she wrote
it around the 70s which probably preceded any wide publicity re lesbian
self-insemination?
I suspect that (just as levels of sexual drive vary from individual to
individual, but are influenced in various ways by social/cultural context)
maternal/parental desires vary widely. As with sex, there's a certain amount
of sleepwalking conformity to societal expectations, but this is never (I
hazard) absolute, for reasons to do with individual biology/psychology.
Lesley
Lesley_Hall@msn.com
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