Chloe Leal Current Event

Is Maternal Instinct Only for Moms? Here's the Science. - National Geographichttps://apple.news/ANf1WY4KORnu8Lng5qKUjBg

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy studied the chemical effects of maternal instincts to see if there were any inherent differences between its occurrence in men and women. She tested this on her and her husband’s exposure to their newborn grandson by studying their spit examples. The same radical chemical change which occurred in Sarah Hrdy within twenty-four hours of meeting her grandson occurred within her husband after just a few more days of exposure to their grandson. This proves that men or paternal figures experience the same or nearly equal instincts which was previously believed to primarily, if not, exclusively, belong to women. And this is not limiting to women who gave birth to the child, but also to the changing types of people who adopt children, as the very same effects happen to them too. The article also highlights the contrasts in total birth rates, especially in countries like the US, throughout even recent history and why it may be.

In response to the beginning of women’s large-scale integration into the workforce in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ideology of the Cult of Domesticity became to combat the idea of a middle-class mother working. This ideology promoted women as a solely domestic figure who cares for the children, is pious, pure, and submissive. The assigned role of homemaker and “belonging” as such has long begun deteriorating, and though, as Sarah Hrdy believes, the instinct which did seem to chemically obligate women to child-caring and bearing, being economically successful and established, has stayed consistent, what has changed is how we measure economic success. In tribes residing in Bolivia, women were vital and extremely significant in their communities based on how many healthy children they could produce. Nowadays, we measure our success and gear towards less abstract monetary values, like what sort of job one has. Due to this shift in measures of success, as well as knowledge in contraceptives and healths, women delay or sometimes altogether skip having children. Furthermore, there are some chemical explanations as to women’s roles in earlier societies and its echoes into ours, but not necessarily always in the way we imagine.