>Lloyd,
>
>What I see when I read your extract 'The Gynarchy' is classic
>patriarchy. . .
>Could not the infanticide carried out on female babies be not
>interpreted as an indication that it was understood by women that a girl
>or woman's life was indeed unvalued by a society which favoured and
>privileged men?
>Cathy
Lloyd replies:
First the ad hominum label. As an active feminist since the Sixties, I have
become used to insults rather than scholarly discussion whenever I write
about women, past and present, being anything but loving toward children.
That half of humanity are always loving and the other half despicable --
apparently genetically -- is a common distortion of the valid insights of
feminism. Unfortunately, women are actors as well as victims in history.
Whether mothers have killed 16 billion of their children throughout history
only because "girl's lives were unvalued by men" is an empirical question
which can only be answered by historical research, which is what I have
done over the past four decades and which I have tried to carefully answer
in the 94-page article on historical childrearing on my website. The answer
I discovered -- backed by over 1,000 references, and confirmed by over 100
childhood historians who have worked with me over the past decades in books
and articles listed in these references -- is that mothers killed, tied up,
abandoned to abusive wetnurses, tortured and beat their children routinely
because of internal as well as external (patriarchal) reasons. To dispute
this you would have to do some actual primary source childhood research and
publish it, which I believe you have not done. Instead, historians usually
fall back on saying that Linda Pollack has shown that mothers were almost
always loving in the past, as they are in the present, and that
"no significant change in parental care or affection given to an infant
throughout the four centuries. With few exceptions, children seemed to be
quite attached to their parents as in-fants and continued to have deep
affection for them. Over the centuries children were an integral part of
their families, happy, free from worry, and certainly not oppressed or
regimented. "
Pollack describes her research methodology in a chapter of breathtaking
originality. She proposes that all the primary sources used by child
historians to date must be ignored except for diaries and autobiographies.
Since only 27 out of the 496 sources she examined were autobiographies, she
therefore overwhelmingly relied on parents' diaries for her book. Thus, in
order for abuse of children to considered
present for her, it would have to have been written down by the
perpetrator. (A similar methodology would construct a statistical history
of crime by ignoring all police reports and relying solely on the diaries
of criminals to establish crime rate statistics.) The possibility that one
could beat one's child without writing it down in one's diary is considered
impossible.
By the way, that I also credit mothers throughout history with nearly all
the progress made in childrearing, and thus in historical personality and
in society, is never mentioned by those who call me a "mother-basher." As I
state at the beginning of the childrearing article: "What is miraculous-and
what is the source of most social progress-is that mothers throughout
history have slowly and successfully struggled with their fear and hatred
with so little help from other and have managed to evolve the loving,
empathic childrearing one can find in many families around the world
today."
Patriarchy, too, has internal sources which can be discovered through
proper historical research into primary source documents. Men do not hate
women because of their genes. Men who are products of loving mothers and
fathers do not hate women. But family love is a slow historical
achievement, not a presupposition.
Lloyd deMause
[log in to unmask]
|