Word: motherhood
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...their genetic legacy and the infant getting a team of surrogate moms in return. "Babies can learn to be quite satisfied with any of a select group of caretakers," says Hrdy, whose book Mother Nature is the most notable and artful of a flock of new studies re-examining motherhood...
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...
Instinct," in its human applications, can be a fighting word. Prefaced with "maternal," it's often deployed as a warm-up for the old "barefoot and pregnant" prescription for feminine fulfillment. In fact, if motherhood is a mindlessly instinct-driven occupation, why bother with feet at all? In their zeal to reduce women to reproductive devices, the ancient Chinese eliminated the female foot, at least as a means of locomotion. More recently, in 1981, a male biologist implied in the esteemed journal Science that human females evolved to stand upright long after males did because what did females have...
...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...