Childfree, Feminist. 狭隘之所以致命是因为不理解差异的常态而四处套用自己的标准和经验且不自知。让差异成为寻常的事情，为无法知晓的事情保留余地，是保持谦逊和进步的方式。聊聊自主不生育，讨论下女性话题，也时常分享下别的。
No.3 The so-called nature
Before discussing the existence of motherhood, I searched for the definition of the word motherhood and when it was invented. Motherhood refers to a mother's instinct to love her children, and it also refers to a woman's instinct to protect and love people or things like a mother. The word in the Etymology Dictionary is said to have originated in the 15th century from the French maternité, and has been used since 1893 as a quasi-adjective referring to clothing designed for pregnant women. The original English text is as follows:
maternity (n.)
1610s, "quality or condition of being a mother," from French maternité "motherhood" (15c.), from Medieval Latin maternitatem (nominative maternitas ) "motherhood," from Latin māternus "of a mother," from māter "mother" ( see mother (n.1). Used from 1893 as a quasi-adjective in reference to garments designed for pregnant women. Maternity leave in reference to working women is attested by 1942.
In Elisabeth Badinter's book "L'amour en plus" on motherhood, according to her research and literature review, the word motherhood did not exist for centuries, for centuries, even millennia, We've been talking about motherhood rather than the word motherhood, so the word "motherhood" comes up on a relatively recent historical line. In her book, in the French society of the 17th and 18th centuries, children were sent to the home of a nurse in the countryside when they were born, and their biological parents were rarely seen. The lack of adequate care and premature death caused by spiritual abandonment and material deprivation were very common. common. The mother's behavior, often between indifference and abandonment, swayed back and forth in this place, and this indifference and abandonment persisted for nearly two centuries. Elisabeth said, “Mother love has been talked about for so long in an instinctive form that it’s easy to believe that this kind of caring for young children, regardless of time and space, is deeply ingrained in the nature of women. In our eyes, every A woman who, by becoming a mother, finds in herself all the answers to her life. It's as if a pre-formed, automatic and necessary program is just waiting to be activated."
It is not so much the progress of the times and the development and reform of the economic, humanistic and social division of labor that have changed the social reality of indifference and abandonment in the past two centuries. It became popular, and the social moral standards and requirements for motherhood also increased and spread.
The creation and definition of the word "motherhood" is not a product of social evolution. In France, after the 17th century, adults began to change their views on childhood and gave a new attention to children. The concept of attention at that time Far from treating the child as the center of the family, under the ideology of Platonism, 17th-century pedagogy believed in atonement and punishment - "in order to save one's soul, do not hesitate to punish the body." As China has always been Infant abandonment and infanticide, when parents can exercise unlimited control over their children, and children are their parents' appendages and private property rather than independent subjects, violence is inevitable, not to mention the status of children. Consciousness was far from being present in those days.
Moreover, the essence of naming and definition is a kind of power, and the things or people that are named and defined will be labeled and classified, and the origin of the word "motherhood", in retrospect, is just an invention of being defined and named. In the course of social development, conforming to the trend and becoming the mainstream has been publicized into the hearts of the people, and it has been normalized without thinking. Those who hold the right to name win the truth, while those who are named seem to have lost the space for refutation. Before no other words are created, only this possibility is allowed, and the tolerance for "heterogeneous" is very low. We have been brainwashed a lot unconsciously. In Chizuru Ueno's book, he also mentioned the terrible binding power of this kind of words on people, "If you don't master that kind of words in advance, people can't express them." Creating the definition of "motherhood" allows many women to learn this concept in various media, realize this "nature", and then characterize their feelings and behaviors. As for the difference between women and men, why there is no universal value that father's love is nature is another topic.
If you look at it from an extreme perspective, the mother's indifference, violence and even killing her son actually exist. First of all, you can refer to the killing of children in the animal kingdom.
Compared with reality, "tiger poison does not eat children" is more like the wishful thinking and self-willingness of human beings to anthropomorphize animals. The killing of cubs in the animal kingdom is real and common. In a 2014 Le Monde report, researchers such as Elise Huchard, a behavioral ecologist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, conducted an observational study of 260 mammal species and found that "infanticide" was found in 119 of them. , "infanticide" is defined as the killing of a minor of the same species by an adult animal. Two types of infanticide due to group structure and reproductive strategies are excluded, namely, males kill offspring of other males in order to pass on their genes; females kill offspring of other males (rarely compared to the former). ). The motivations for these two acts of slaughter may be better understood by humans, the competition for survival and the need to reproduce genes. But there is a third type where female animals kill their own offspring. Occurs many times in bears, canines, and felines, at the end of 2013, a female sloth bear at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, USA ate two of her cubs, Duke University Evolutionary Anthropology Home Leslie Digby commented that probably because the cubs were sick, eating them as food would benefit their own survival. Killing slow-growing and diseased offspring for healthy genes is cruel but essential and is an important part of animal evolution. It's just that the behavior of animals killing cubs will not be judged by the so-called "moral" in human society.
Go back to human beings, search for infanticide and you can see different works, from the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the Yuan Dynasty, the Qin Dynasty, the French Bourbon Dynasty, etc. to the present, the geographical span of China, Japan, India, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, USA, Australia, Ghana. In Anne-Marie Kilday's book A History of Infanticide in Britain, c. 1600 to the Present, it is mentioned that Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilizations, including our own ancestors. From hunters, gatherers, to high civilizations, including our own ancestors, people on every continent and with different levels of cultural sophistication practice infanticide.
A French criminology professor Alain Bauer once commented that in all fields of crime, the majority of female offenders is the murder of their own children. Convicted of murder, most of the murders of children under 15 were women. During the reporting period 1996-2015, the judiciary recorded 325 convictions for this offence, 70% of which were against women (227 convictions). According to him, women who have a tendency to kill newborn babies, who are buried when found, are frozen, etc., have a sense of resistance in women who refuse to conceive and cannot accept the newborn. The 2018 public report jointly released by the French Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Health showed that in the period 2012-2016, 363 deaths of children under the age of 18 were attributable to mothers, fathers or stepfathers. If the focus is on the 55 newborns killed in less than 24 hours after birth, the perpetrators are mostly mothers during that time.
In a 1998 study of infanticide in the United States, a child was killed almost every day if death certificates were available at the national level in the United States. And more research suggests that the true figure may be doubled or more, because children who have been abused and disappeared without a death certificate are not counted.
The history of female infanticide in traditional Chinese culture is also very long. Female infants and girls have long been regarded as a worthless group. No matter whether they are poor or rich, daughters are more likely to be victims of child killing. Not to mention the drowning wind that existed in more than ten provinces before, as well as the Zhenying Pagoda in the middle and late Qing Dynasty, the torture of insects, ants, snakes and rats, and the pain of being unable to be buried. Some women, as perpetrators, have already killed and drowned countless daughters, so what about the "instinct" of motherhood.
When I looked at the research and criminology-related data on infanticide and child killing, I didn’t expect this field to be so interesting. It’s not a sentence or two. It can be summed up by listing a few data. Among them, the media’s image of motherhood was created. The choice of words in the news reports on maternal infanticide, the exploration of the reasons for maternal infanticide in the field of criminology, etc., I plan to take a chance and write about it in detail. But the more I look at it, the more I feel that the environment has a profound impact on people. History and trends have changed people's cognition and behavior greatly. It is a very lucky thing to be able to live in an era of relative peace and freedom.
Finally, I want to end with a few passages from Elisabeth Badinter's book. Contrairement aux idées reçues, il n'est peut-être pas inscrit profondément dans la nature féminine. À observer l' évolution des attitudes maternelles, on constate que l'intérêt et le dévouement pour l'enfant se manifestent ou ne se manifestent pas. La tendresse existe ou n'existe pas. Maternal love is only a human emotion. Like any relationship, it is uncertain, fragile and imperfect. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it may not be deeply rooted in female nature. When looking at changes in mothers' attitudes, we see that women's interest and devotion to their children can be shown or not shown. Gentleness either exists or it doesn't exist.
«Au lieu d'instinct, ne vaudrait-il pas mieux parler d'une fabuleuse pression sociale pour que la femme ne puisse s'accomplir que dans la maternité » not so much a female instinct as in a magical social pressure Under the influence, women can only realize their own value when they are mothers.
Quand une femme a des ambitions (mondaines, intellectuelles, ou professionnelles comme aujourd'hui) et les moyens de les satisfaire, elle est infiniment moins tentée que d'autres d'investir son temps et son énergie dans l'élevage de ses enfants. When a woman is socially, academically, professionally ambitious and has a path to achieve her ambitions, she is more reluctant than others to devote time and energy to parenting.
I hope that all women seek kindness and benevolence, and the most important thing is to have choices.
References:
1. https://www.etymonline.com/word/maternity
2. Dieter Lukas, Elise Huchard.The evolution of infanticide by males in mammalian societies[J].Science.2014
3. Badinter, Elisabeth. L'amour en plus. Flammarion.
5. http://www.ifuun.com/a2019070619934847/
7. Margaret G. Spinelli. Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers Who Kill. 2002
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