Rediscovering Eve by Carol Meyers

Author:Carol Meyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

Women and Children (Reproductive Activities)

However they may depict its characteristics, studies of the household uniformly include women’s role in biological reproduction as part of household life. But they rarely include the role of women in the reproduction of social identities. Yet women not only bear children but also bear the major responsibility, at least when their offspring are young, for teaching them how to behave and what to value. In addition, they instruct their children, mainly daughters, in the technologies of the economic activities described in the preceding section. Thus reproduction refers to both having children and teaching them life skills. These are largely interdependent processes whereby the “wider social and cultural norms, rules, and ideals, as well as the more particular ‘way of the household’ are internalized, mediated, and experienced.”46 Reproduction is an important maintenance activity because it creates children and also socializes them as “future full members of the group.”47

Childbirth has already been discussed in several chapters, and thus the focus here is on women as educators and socializers of the young. However, it should be emphasized that, unlike in the developed world today, bearing and raising children were not understood as discrete aspects of a woman’s life. Nor did women choose, as many do today, whether to work, have a family, or both. With life spans being relatively short (see chapter 5), as much as half of an Israelite woman’s life would have been taken up with motherhood. How different that is from the situation in the developed world today, in which women choosing to have children might devote only about one-eighth of an 80-year life span to fulltime motherhood! For Israelite women, adulthood and motherhood were virtually coterminous. Yet maintenance tasks dominated daily life. Thus in subsistence societies in which offspring are critical for household survival and continuity, child-rearing is integrated into daily maintenance routines and does not stand out as a central or separate responsibility.48 The socialization of children, also essential for household continuity, was likewise integrated into daily activities.

The range of household maintenance activities in today’s developed world is significantly smaller than in biblical antiquity, and public education is generally required. Yet the socialization of the young is still an important part of family life. All the more so in the Iron Age, where the household was the only arena in which children could learn basic social and technical skills as well as the cultural patterns of their household and community. The information imparted by mothers to the next generation was all-encompassing in terms of the life skills needed in agrarian households.

A child acquired most technical expertise simply by experience. Children in traditional societies are an integral part of the household labor force. Toddlers perform a few simple tasks and have some regular assignments by the age of six, and children older than ten are often like adults in their contributions to household work.49 Biblical texts mention the labor of children: for example, helping with harvest (Prov 10:5) and gathering firewood (Jer 7:18). Younger

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.