Broodmales

Nor Hall and Warren G. Dawson, Broodmales (Spring, 1989)Yet another piece, which we seem to be finding on a fairly regular basis this days, of accessible, readable social criticism. Who'd'a thunk it? Hall's forty-odd-page introduction to Dawson's paper, written in the nineteen-twenties, does little but revise and extend his remarks, putting them in a more modern context. But since Hall also makes the stuff a bit more readable (mostly by updating Dawson's still Victorian prose style), that's not a bad thing at all.Hall and Dawson are looking at the custom of couvade, where the mother and father roles are reversed upon (and sometimes before) the birth of a child; the mother immediately goes back to work, while the father takes to bed, nurses the child (one assumes with a bottle or "a finger dipped in milk and honey," as one would have it, until Dawson addresses in passing a condition that makes men lactate; one of my real contentions with the book is that I wish he'd spent more time addressing this), suffers dietary privation and restrictions, etc. While Dawson's work is mostly a survey (the bibliography is almost as long as the paper itself), he does spend an entire chapter, the paper's longest, on the significance of couvade (coming to the rather strongly-worded conclusion that civilized societies are, where couvade is concerned, ignoramuses, the word with which he ends the paper, all in capitals and followed by an exclamation point; one really gets a sense of the man's frustration).The subject matter is interesting, but the reason I rated this one so highly is Hall's, and more surprisingly Dawson's, readability. Despite writing for the philosopher-and-anthropologist crowd, it's obvious that both went to some pains to make sure that the word would be readable and digestible by the great unwashed (i.e., you and me), and it's always an excellent thing when such a book is presented in such a way.Fascinating. Recommended. *** ½