Mother Nature
Feb. 25th, 2006 03:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
library_mamaMother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy My loyal readers (such as I may have) will perhaps not be surprised to learn that this book is a wonderful book, a fabulous book, the most important book that I’ve read in a very long time. This book, my friends, is a serious scientific look at motherhood by a scientist who is also a mother. As such, it is crammed with so much good information that I can only describe part of it to you here. Hrdy is a primatologist trained in anthropology and evolutionary theory, and she looks seriously at motherhood across time and across species, comparing what is actually known about mothers with what has been said about mothers by mostly male scientists over the past couple of hundred years. Perhaps not surprisingly, her conclusions are quite different.
Putting “motherguilt” into perspective, she shows that mothers have always had to make tradeoffs between their own survival and that of their children – and that primates of all species rely on child care from other members of their group. She talks about family planning in primates, traditional cultures, and early modern Europe. Fertility used to come years after sexual desire, I learned, giving girls a chance to fool around before they had any chance of becoming mothers. In early modern Europe, the consequence of increased nutrition without the resources to care for children on the one hand or birth control on the other was millions of babies being left in foundling homes, the vast majority of whom ultimately died. Hrdy gives the most rational argument on abortion that I have ever seen, effectively explaining how both positions are rooted in behaviors millions of years old. She talks about the conflicts between what mothers, fathers, and children want and need, and the compromises that we make between them. Where feminists have tended to ignore research into evolutionary and attachment theory as inherently sexist, Hrdy separates the facts from previous cultural bias, and talks about how to pay attention to the needs of both your children and your career.
If you are a mother, or a father, or are planning to become one, I highly recommend this book.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
garrity, this most definitely means you! The only sad part of this recommendation is that it is lengthy and dense, so that unless you are a Dedicated Reader or accustomed to reading scholarly writing, it will take you a while to get through it. Still even if (dare I suggest it) you don’t make it through the whole book, you will be rewarded by reading however much of it you do read, wherever you start, since it is stuffed full of interesting and obscure knowledge about mothers of all species and all times. Your world will never be quite the same.
Putting “motherguilt” into perspective, she shows that mothers have always had to make tradeoffs between their own survival and that of their children – and that primates of all species rely on child care from other members of their group. She talks about family planning in primates, traditional cultures, and early modern Europe. Fertility used to come years after sexual desire, I learned, giving girls a chance to fool around before they had any chance of becoming mothers. In early modern Europe, the consequence of increased nutrition without the resources to care for children on the one hand or birth control on the other was millions of babies being left in foundling homes, the vast majority of whom ultimately died. Hrdy gives the most rational argument on abortion that I have ever seen, effectively explaining how both positions are rooted in behaviors millions of years old. She talks about the conflicts between what mothers, fathers, and children want and need, and the compromises that we make between them. Where feminists have tended to ignore research into evolutionary and attachment theory as inherently sexist, Hrdy separates the facts from previous cultural bias, and talks about how to pay attention to the needs of both your children and your career.
If you are a mother, or a father, or are planning to become one, I highly recommend this book.
garrity, this most definitely means you! The only sad part of this recommendation is that it is lengthy and dense, so that unless you are a Dedicated Reader or accustomed to reading scholarly writing, it will take you a while to get through it. Still even if (dare I suggest it) you don’t make it through the whole book, you will be rewarded by reading however much of it you do read, wherever you start, since it is stuffed full of interesting and obscure knowledge about mothers of all species and all times. Your world will never be quite the same.
