Word: motherhood
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Million Moms are blatantly using motherhood to sell their message. The march will feature a stroller parade and a family tent, so parents have a place to take young children when they get antsy during the speeches. Ann Stevens, a mother of three from Springfield, Va., says, "I told my husband that this year, instead of breakfast in bed, I want to do this for Mother's Day. I have children, and I want them to be around years from...
Hence the elaborate symphony of hormonal responses that prompts us to fall in love with our drool-faced, incontinent offspring. Hence too the many cunning and often unladylike features of primate motherhood: the sexual promiscuity that, in some species, may help ensure the acquisition of top-grade sperm; the scheming for status, since primate babies, including human ones, often inherit mom's social position; the use of alternative caretakers when mom is tired or busy...
...career and nanny--can only be a pitiful freak. Mid-20th century Freudians urged women to put aside ambition and masochistically (their word) submit to the maternal instinct. In the 19th century, gynecologists warned that any use of the female intellect--from novel reading to higher education--could foreclose motherhood by causing the uterus to, quite literally, wither away. Happiness was a full womb and a vacant mind...
...past, feminists have responded to this kind of talk by arguing that women have no biologically scripted inner nature to violate. Hey, girls just wanna have fun! But the truth, according to anthropologist Sarah Hrdy, is that women are biologically hard-wired for motherhood, only not in the ways men imagine. We are primates, after all, not spiders or guppies, and this means we are not scripted for indiscriminate reproduction but for well-spaced offspring, each requiring lengthy care...
...women, and their consignment to frequent childbearing, patriarchy was born. The cultural pattern found in so many tribal horticultural societies--including warfare, male domination and polygyny--began to take hold worldwide. By the dawn of "civilization," the venerable female tendencies Hrdy tells us are so essential to successful primate motherhood--ambition, ingenuity and sexual adventurousness--had been redefined as immoral or at least "unnatural...