activities. In gatherer-hunter cultures, such as those of the Bushman of southern Africa and the Australian aborigines, the
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fact that a woman is pregnant or that an hour ago she gave birth does not interfere with daily routines, except for the additional task of nursing. It sometimes happens that on the march, in moving from one food area to another, a woman falls out, gives birth to her child, catches up with her companions, and behaves as if nothing requiring heroic measures had occurred. If, as rarely happens, another child is born to her a little too soon after the last one, it may be disposed of, for it may constitute a real disability, since under the conditions of the gatherer-hunter way of life it is difficult to take care of more than one infant at a time. There must be adequate spacing between children, not for this reason alone but also because the responsibility of fostering a child is considered virtually a fulltime commitment. Owing to intensive breastfeeding lasting four or more years conception rarely occurs at less than four-year intervals.
Childbirth and nursing do introduce additional activities into the life of the female, but such activities do not necessarily constitute disadvantages. In comparison with certain forms of masculine mobility, and under certain social conditions, such activities may be disadvantages, and it would be wrong to underestimate them. It would, however, be equally wrong to overestimate such disadvantages; yet this has been done, and I believe the evidence strongly suggests that it has been deliberately done by male "authorities," if to some extent unconsciously. Besides, do we not have Divine sanction for such practice? Does it not say in Genesis 3:16 that God said "unto the woman, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." So it is ordained that labor and childbirth shall be hazards and painful. Clearly, then, if one can turn childbirth into a handicapping function, then that makes women so much more inferior to the sex that suffers from no such handicap. Those who resort to such devices are usually concerned not so much with the inferiorities of others as with their own superiority. If one happens to be lacking in certain capacities with which the opposite sex is naturally endowed, and those capacities happen to be highly, if unacknowledgedly, valued, then one can compensate for one's own deficiency by devaluing the capacities of others. By turning such capacities into handicaps, one can cause those thus afflicted to feel inferior, while anyone not so "handicapped" can then feel superior.
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Farfetched as the idea may appear to some, the fact is that men have long been jealous of women's ability to give birth to children and have in some societies even envied their ability to menstruate; but men have not been content with turning these capacities into disabilities, for they have surrounded the one with handicapping rituals and the other with taboos that in most cases amount to punishments. They have even gone so far as to assert that pregnancy occurs in the male first, and that it is entirely dependent upon him whether the female becomes pregnant or not. For example, among numerous Australian aboriginal peoples it was the common belief that intercourse had no causative relation to pregnancy, and that pregnancy is the result of the entry of a spirit child into the female.
19 In many of these tribes it is the spirit child that has entered the male first, or he dreamed it. Should he desire a child, he tells his wife what has happened and the spirit child is then transferred to her. Even then she is merely regarded as the incubator of the child planted in her by the male. The idea is clearly expressed by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) in his play, Eumenides, in which Athene, the daughter of Zeus who sprang from his head, is made to say, "The parent that which is called her
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fact that a woman is pregnant or that an hour ago she gave birth does not interfere with daily routines, except for the additional task of nursing. It sometimes happens that on the march, in moving from one food area to another, a woman falls out, gives birth to her child, catches up with her companions, and behaves as if nothing requiring heroic measures had occurred. If, as rarely happens, another child is born to her a little too soon after the last one, it may be disposed of, for it may constitute a real disability, since under the conditions of the gatherer-hunter way of life it is difficult to take care of more than one infant at a time. There must be adequate spacing between children, not for this reason alone but also because the responsibility of fostering a child is considered virtually a fulltime commitment. Owing to intensive breastfeeding lasting four or more years conception rarely occurs at less than four-year intervals.
Childbirth and nursing do introduce additional activities into the life of the female, but such activities do not necessarily constitute disadvantages. In comparison with certain forms of masculine mobility, and under certain social conditions, such activities may be disadvantages, and it would be wrong to underestimate them. It would, however, be equally wrong to overestimate such disadvantages; yet this has been done, and I believe the evidence strongly suggests that it has been deliberately done by male "authorities," if to some extent unconsciously. Besides, do we not have Divine sanction for such practice? Does it not say in Genesis 3:16 that God said "unto the woman, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children." So it is ordained that labor and childbirth shall be hazards and painful. Clearly, then, if one can turn childbirth into a handicapping function, then that makes women so much more inferior to the sex that suffers from no such handicap. Those who resort to such devices are usually concerned not so much with the inferiorities of others as with their own superiority. If one happens to be lacking in certain capacities with which the opposite sex is naturally endowed, and those capacities happen to be highly, if unacknowledgedly, valued, then one can compensate for one's own deficiency by devaluing the capacities of others. By turning such capacities into handicaps, one can cause those thus afflicted to feel inferior, while anyone not so "handicapped" can then feel superior.
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Farfetched as the idea may appear to some, the fact is that men have long been jealous of women's ability to give birth to children and have in some societies even envied their ability to menstruate; but men have not been content with turning these capacities into disabilities, for they have surrounded the one with handicapping rituals and the other with taboos that in most cases amount to punishments. They have even gone so far as to assert that pregnancy occurs in the male first, and that it is entirely dependent upon him whether the female becomes pregnant or not. For example, among numerous Australian aboriginal peoples it was the common belief that intercourse had no causative relation to pregnancy, and that pregnancy is the result of the entry of a spirit child into the female.
19 In many of these tribes it is the spirit child that has entered the male first, or he dreamed it. Should he desire a child, he tells his wife what has happened and the spirit child is then transferred to her. Even then she is merely regarded as the incubator of the child planted in her by the male. The idea is clearly expressed by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.) in his play, Eumenides, in which Athene, the daughter of Zeus who sprang from his head, is made to say, "The parent that which is called her
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