The change in culture that has occurred since child mortality rates have dropped is under-appreciated by many people.
And not just child mortality. Young adults died off at much higher rates as well.
In such a culture, attitudes towards death are very different from what have now.
E.g., an entire high school and the local community goes into shock and depression when a kid dies in a car accident. Thousands of years ago a teenager dying would be just another death of many the tribe experienced. The death of a tribal elder would be a far more mourned event.
Something else that hasn’t been covered yet: it generally takes a bit for parents to bond/fall in love with the new arrival, sometimes as long as weeks- and it’s likely that leaving a screaming stranger on a hill-side is less painful than someone you’re actually attached to/invested in.
Hells bells, when I was in first grade, a kid tried to run across the street and got smeared by a school bus. I can distinctly remember the huge blood and whatever smear on the street - it was on my walk to school route [and yes, as a first grader of 6 years old I walked the half mile to school and back every day.] That was it, someone probably came out and hosed the gore off the road. No counseling, little floral crosses or anything, jut another day at school - and believe me, I would remember any sort of huge reaction. All we got was basically a mention of ‘see kids, this is why we don’t cross the road without looking both ways…’ sort of speech from the teacher. Now a kid gets a hangnail and they bring in grief counselors, or so it seems.
I remember reading about some Mediterranean or African culture where the newborn is not named until the third day - the theory being a lot of infants die before that if they have developmental or health problems. (I assume baptism is an offshoot of the same concept?)
Also saw an article on female circumcision (actually, genitial mutilation) that said the older females were some of the instigators in that behavior as much as males; i.e. cultural indoctrination has a strong influence overriding personal feelings. The woman who just had a baby and is lying on a bed, very weak, is in no position to argue with what is usually her husband’s extended family including mother-in-law and the father who probably owns all the farmland. Plus, a decision like that has probably been seen coming for months - “if this one’s a girl again, hasta la vista baby…”. It’s not like it would be a surprise, flip a coin after it’s born.
People in those days had to be pretty hard-hearted. How many here could raise a goat or chickens, then chop their heads off, hang them to bleed and gut them? Real meat comes wrapped in plastic.
Sad comment on infant mortality. I was doing my family tree, and around the 1830’s or so there were three sons in a row, born a year apart, all christened “Peter” and none survived a year.
I’m sure it hurt. But it was a pain that wasn’t unexpected. Most women grew up with the knowledge that they would see one or more of their children die.
As an anecdote supporting high infant mortality rates through time, I’ll drop this here:
When life is hard, and your resources are limited, you do what you have to - Or what you think you have to.
Economically, women were valued less than men throughout history - they could do less physical labor, and had a high chance of dying in childbirth, and were - rightly or wrongly - considered a resource sink. This limited their agency, and greatly reduced the value of girl-children in patriarchal societies - which are the majority, historically.
Combine Resource, Economic, and Agency issues, and you’ve got a fairly strong case for selective infanticide.
As a BTW: As mentioned up-thread, you grow some thick skin when you’re poor. We named our food - hand raised it. Then we killed it and ate it. I personally, at age six, took the head off of geese that I had raised from goslings. Good eating.
Plus, in many societies women come with a dowry - you have to pay someone to take a daughter off your hands. (In luckier societies, you trade her for a few goats) Then she goes to live with the husband’s family and devotes all her time to them. 14 years of groceries down the drain.
I’m not sure what are you talking about with the mention of baptism: baptism is supposed to take place relatively early, and in fact nowadays it’s taking place later than it used to thanks to lowered mortality rates. Many people my age including myself ('68 vintage) were baptised without our mother there as she was still recovering from the delivery; several of my classmates, teachers, parents of classmates… had been baptised without a priest present by a midwife or parent who feared the child would die.
Girl babies have certainly been less value in most cultures, and even up to recent times more likely to be victims of infanticide, and in places like China girl fetuses are more likely to be aborted (albeit the practice is technically prohibited since they now have a dangerous imbalance of men:women in some of the younger generations), but some of the comments in this thread are silly.
Women weren’t “unable to work the fields”, in fact we have tons of direct evidence in early agricultural communities women worked the fields quite often. Most of human history isn’t represented by the upper class women in Western/Eastern cultures who lived almost as glass birds in a cage, the vast majority of women were of peasant stock and lived hard and worked hard. Certainly among the peasantry there was still some sexual division of labor on “ancillary” tasks; but it’s completely ahistorical to believe a typical peasant woman spent her life in and around the house while the strong men worked the field. Men are stronger, but women are more than physically capable of doing strenuous manual labor.
I think a lot of you are confusing the very upper classes from the past where women obviously didn’t join the armies of the time (while upper class men did), and generally weren’t engaged in “recreational sport” like upper class men did, with the majority of the population. A family having women who don’t pull their own weight in the family’s physical labors is an incredibly upper class and early modern world concept.
Much of the “men work and women stay at home” among the middle and lower classes comes from the industrial revolution. Early on women were working the hardest industrial jobs you could imagine, even things like hauling coal carts in British coal mines. But slowly “reformers” felt some of these heavy industrial jobs were too dangerous for women, women were also typically paid less than men because they were generally less strong, so they couldn’t do the same volume of physical work as a strong man so it was seen as perfectly expected they would be paid less for their time. When industrial wages began to go up throughout the 19th century, it made it so many families even middle class and lower could get by with women not working nearly as much, and eventually in the 20th century many women in middle class families didn’t need to do paid work at all. Many people act like the women’s work movement of the 60s and 70s was overturning thousands of years of precedent, but it was really just reversing a trend that had only existed for a tiny blip of history, due to frankly unique and unsustainable reasons.
Of course “women don’t work” is a modern bourgeois trope, it has only applied to middle class women of the industrial age, and never to working class women. For most of history most people have worked at subsistence agriculture, and the women were out in the fields doing stoop labor. Heck, in many parts of Africa even today farming is considered women’s work. The women are out in the fields all day breaking their backs, and the men are engaged in proper manly behavior, like sitting around drinking beer and shooting the shit with their buddies about the heroic hunting trip they’re going to go on next week.
Of course that still doesn’t mean that women are assigned the same social value as men…that’s the point. Women do the work while the men sit around drinking beer because the women have lower social standing. The fact that the men wouldn’t have any beer without the women’s work doesn’t mean that women’s work is higher status.
Many cultures that use infanticide as means of birth control (whether they admit that is what they do or not) mother and child separate immediately at birth. There’s no “bonding”. They also will often have naming or initiation rites that have to occur before a child is considered fully human and a member of their tribe or society.
Do you have a citation for sex-selective infanticide being common through history? Not challenging you, but I’m a bit dubious. Present-day India isn’t necessarily characteristic of “premodern societies” in general (and sex selective abortion / infanticide isn’t even universal across different regions of south asia).
Dowrys weren’t really a thing in Africa- in African societies, or at least many of them, men generally had to pay a bride price to the bride’s family.
Excellent post. I would further add that it was the development of cheap mass transit that led to the bifurcation of “home” and “office/workplace”. Before that people lived where they worked.
Some of the other posters are letting modern day issues translate to how much people of the past Must Have Acted. Since, we have incidence of sex selective abortion now then infantacide (which was of course widespread not rare) must also have been. And then the try and invent senarios how this could be done without the mother’s disapproval. Trickery and trashing seem to be it, since women in those days were like trained pets who could be dealt with that way, not fully realised human beings. And, of course the mother was the only person who cared about whether the baby lived or died, the father, elder siblings, grand parents et al were indifferent or active participants.
I think you are translating modern day views on gender relations onto the past. “Agency”? Seriously dude? Who amongst farm workers has much agency 200 years ago.
In doing family tree research in rural Merry Olde Englande, from about 1700 to 1837, the church registers if they give the date of birth also, indicate a pause of several days to even 3 months before a child was baptised. not sure if this was for financial reasons. (Also a lot of children born/baptised 3 to 6 months after the marriage was recorded.)
Also, I’ll repeat - the problem with girls was they grew up to move away and be productive for the husbands family, not yours. And in many societies, you had to pay the husband to take her. Boys were the peasant’s old age pension.
In Judaism, parents are not required to mourn a child who dies before three months of age, and if the child has been sickly, it sometimes had not even been named. Burial is required by law, but that is all.
I had some friends who lost a newborn in the hospital. The baby died, but the nurses and other staff people kept trying to get then to hold and name the dead fetus. When they weren’t interested, they were “in denial.”
The truth is, they were simply grieving in a typically Jewish way, and they had to enlist the help of the rabbi to get people to shut up already.
How soon after birth baptism occurs is probably going to depend on denomination , culture , the time period , does the baby seem sick etc. Three days is quicker than usual nowadays. Three months may even be quick. No one pressured me to have my kids baptized before I left the hospital - but my old lady Italian-American great-aunts were scandalized that I took them out before baptism. According to the old ladies, after being taken home from the hospital , they literally were not to leave the house until we were leaving for the baptism. In 1989, not 1969.
Even cheap/quick transportation made an enormous difference, allowing people who would previously have lived in farms to move to the nearest village. One of the elements which caused an amazing increase in literacy for many rural areas was the tractor.