Is modern life making women “Ignorant and Ill-equipped?’

Here’s the headline from a review of a scientific paper on Physorg.com:

“Modern Life—making women ‘ignorant and ill-equipped’ to cope with motherhood.”

I had to click on that one. Mostly because we live in the ‘information age.’ There are a billion web-sites out there with parenting advice (NO, I’m not the only one. And some of them are even SERIOUS). Full-text books on the subject are available for download. And if you like paper, Amazon currently has 480 books tagged as “motherhood,” that you can get overnight for $2.99.

‘Ignorant’ is a pretty strong word.

Ill-equipped, maybe. Until someone puts that baby in your arms, NO amount of reading is going to equip you. But, since we all know that motherhood is a seat-of-your-pants operation anyway, I’m not sure there’s much more that can be done in the equipping department. Maybe we should order more diapers.

Okay, so I read the article. A lady named Dr. Angela Davis, whose credentials appear to be in the history of medicine, at University of Warwick, interviewed some women. Afterwards, she came to the startling conclusion that modern society’s trend toward mobility means that women have no family support, and therefore are ignorant and ill-equipped to deal with motherhood.

Um, I guess they don’t have phones in Warwick. Wait, I know they have phones in Warwick, because I used one not too far from there, not too long ago.

Furthermore, she says that the trend toward in hospital births (that’s been going on since, say, the 1950s) means that women don’t get to experience birth until they have their own.

You’d think someone in the history of medicine would know better.

Women down through the centuries have been kept TOTALLY in the dark about sexuality and that nasty stuff that happens down there. Not one woman prior to the mid-fifties or so (outside of medical personnel) would have seen a delivery prior to her own (and that’s exactly the same time that hospital births rise, and so women didn’t get a chance to see a delivery–circular logic at its finest).

And women down through the centuries have been ripped out of the bosom of their families and shipped off to their husbands, whom they usually had never met. Not much family support there, either.

But here’s the best line:

Dr Davis said issues surrounding sex and childbirth in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s were considered taboo and not often discussed in the home. She added that although women now seemed better informed about sex, there was still far too little information given to them about the development of pregnancy, childbirth and infant care.

Maybe the OBs in Warwick are behind the times. My OB (and this was 20 years ago) handed me a copy of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.”

Maybe the women in Warwick can’t read.

I don’t know what happened with this study, but I think it’s fair to say that Dr. Davis is attempting to make some kind of point, and that there’s probably some bias in her interpretation of these interviews.

(Maybe she asked, “Did you feel as though you were fully equipped to handle everything that happened with your children?” Could ANY of us have answered, ‘yes?’)

I hate it when researchers have agendas. Can you tell? Is my soapbox high enough?

I think it’s great that I have a telephone and can call my mom. She’s a wonderful source of advice, but mostly she’s a sympathetic ear. Could I have done it without her? Sure. Would it have been very much different if she had been in the same house? Only in that my husband and I would probably have gotten divorced.

I had witnessed hundreds of births before mine. I had even delivered a hundred or so, myself. Did that prepare me for my own?

Nah. It hurts. Your brain stops working.

I had courses on embryology, pediatrics, lactation, nutrition, neonatology. Did any of that make much difference with my own kids?

Only, I think, in that I might have waited TOO long to call the pediatrician a few times. Sure, the book-learnin’ is handy. But parenting is more about common sense.

Maybe we should start a charity fund for those poor women in Warwick, so they can buy some books. Or an internet connection.

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Related posts:

1. Ever Wonder Why Pregnant Women Don’t Fall Over?
2. Potty Training, Modern Style
3. The Making of Fornication (Or, It’s All Paul’s Fault)
4. You’re Trying to Make My Life Miserable!
5. The Nefarious History of Motherhood

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