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couvade, (from French couver “to hatch”) ritual behaviour undertaken, usually by a man, during or around the birth of a child. Historically, couvade has been poorly defined; it has encompassed practices that are quite divergent in terms of timing, participants, activity, and cause.

Ethnographic examples of couvade have been known to co-occur with pregnancy, parturition, the postpartum period, and even annual festivals celebrating male reenactments of birth. Observers have recorded instances of couvade by biological fathers, other men, women, and children. Examples of ritual behaviour have included a man’s taking to his bed or dressing in his wife’s clothing during her labour and delivery, a new father’s being bound or bandaged in the same manner as a postpartum mother, and a father’s pre- or postpartum avoidance of specific foods or activities (most commonly sexual intercourse or heavy exertion), in some cases for a period of years.

Anthropological interpretations of couvade have shifted over time and have generally reflected the major theoretical standpoint of the era. In the 19th century, cultural evolutionists, who posited that primordial societies were matriarchal, suggested that couvade was a relic of the transition to patriarchy. Early 20th-century functionalists held that it was a method through which fathers publicly accepted the legitimacy of their children. By the 1970s, psychological anthropologists were citing Sigmund Freud’s theories, suggesting that men in matrilineal cultures carry an intrinsic envy of their mother’s status as the core persona of the household and that men overcame that envy and internalized their true, masculine role only by reenacting the work of motherhood. Most of these interpretations considered couvade the act of an individual rather than viewing it as embedded in a larger cultural milieu.

However, by the end of the 20th century researchers had begun to question whether couvade should be viewed as part of a wider ritual cycle surrounding human reproduction and development or, alternatively, if such behaviours are enacted more generally, during periods of liminality or propagation. Both of these situations have been shown to be true, sometimes within a single culture. An example of the former occurs among the Lesu of Melanesia: Lesu men traditionally avoid certain foods before the birth of their children, and the community as a whole engages in similar avoidance when its young people experience passage rites such as initiation or marriage. Lesu couvade behaviour also applies to nonhuman propagation: while a child’s parents avoid sexual intercourse after its birth, the community as a whole avoids intercourse during the pig-farrowing season.

Among the Garifuna of Honduras, fathers abstain from fishing, complex construction activities (such as building a house), and heavy exertion during the postpartum period. Garifuna people explain that this parental behaviour is essential for proper infant development: a child receives food from its mother (in the form of breast milk) but gains its life force directly from its father, through a spiritual umbilicus. Thus, a new father must avoid activities that will “spend” his vigour, because such expenditures may cause his child to fall weak and die. If a new father accidentally engages in an activity that causes him to sweat—sweat being the physical manifestation of vigour—he must rub the fluid on the child’s body so that the energy is passed along to the child rather than dissipated into the atmosphere. Garifuna men also rub perspiration onto their older children as a curative.

Elizabeth Prine Pauls
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feminism, the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. Although largely originating in the West, feminism is manifested worldwide and is represented by various institutions committed to activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.

Throughout most of Western history, women were confined to the domestic sphere, while public life was reserved for men. In medieval Europe, women were denied the right to own property, to study, or to participate in public life. At the end of the 19th century in France, they were still compelled to cover their heads in public, and, in parts of Germany, a husband still had the right to sell his wife. Even as late as the early 20th century, women could neither vote nor hold elective office in Europe and in most of the United States (where several territories and states granted women’s suffrage long before the federal government did so). Women were prevented from conducting business without a male representative, be it father, brother, husband, legal agent, or even son. Married women could not exercise control over their own children without the permission of their husbands. Moreover, women had little or no access to education and were barred from most professions. In some parts of the world, such restrictions on women continue today. See also egalitarianism.

History of feminism

The ancient world

There is scant evidence of early organized protest against such circumscribed status. In the 3rd century bce, Roman women filled the Capitoline Hill and blocked every entrance to the Forum when consul Marcus Porcius Cato resisted attempts to repeal laws limiting women’s use of expensive goods. “If they are victorious now, what will they not attempt?” Cato cried. “As soon as they begin to be your equals, they will have become your superiors.”

That rebellion proved exceptional, however. For most of recorded history, only isolated voices spoke out against the inferior status of women, presaging the arguments to come. In late 14th- and early 15th-century France, the first feminist philosopher, Christine de Pisan, challenged prevailing attitudes toward women with a bold call for female education. Her mantle was taken up later in the century by Laura Cereta, a 15th-century Venetian woman who published Epistolae familiares (1488; “Personal Letters”; Eng. trans. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist), a volume of letters dealing with a panoply of women’s complaints, from denial of education and marital oppression to the frivolity of women’s attire.

The defense of women had become a literary subgenre by the end of the 16th century, when Il merito delle donne (1600; The Worth of Women), a feminist broadside by another Venetian author, Moderata Fonte, was published posthumously. Defenders of the status quo painted women as superficial and inherently immoral, while the emerging feminists produced long lists of women of courage and accomplishment and proclaimed that women would be the intellectual equals of men if they were given equal access to education.

The so-called “debate about women” did not reach England until the late 16th century, when pamphleteers and polemicists joined battle over the true nature of womanhood. After a series of satiric pieces mocking women was published, the first feminist pamphleteer in England, writing as Jane Anger, responded with Jane Anger, Her Protection for Women (1589). This volley of opinion continued for more than a century, until another English author, Mary Astell, issued a more reasoned rejoinder in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697). The two-volume work suggested that women inclined neither toward marriage nor a religious vocation should set up secular convents where they might live, study, and teach.

Influence of the Enlightenment

The feminist voices of the Renaissance never coalesced into a coherent philosophy or movement. This happened only with the Enlightenment, when women began to demand that the new reformist rhetoric about liberty, equality, and natural rights be applied to both sexes.

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Initially, Enlightenment philosophers focused on the inequities of social class and caste to the exclusion of gender. Swiss-born French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, portrayed women as silly and frivolous creatures, born to be subordinate to men. In addition, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which defined French citizenship after the revolution of 1789, pointedly failed to address the legal status of women.

Female intellectuals of the Enlightenment were quick to point out this lack of inclusivity and the limited scope of reformist rhetoric. Olympe de Gouges, a noted playwright, published Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791; “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen”), declaring women to be not only man’s equal but his partner. The following year Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the seminal English-language feminist work, was published in England. Challenging the notion that women exist only to please men, she proposed that women and men be given equal opportunities in education, work, and politics. Women, she wrote, are as naturally rational as men. If they are silly, it is only because society trains them to be irrelevant.

The Age of Enlightenment turned into an era of political ferment marked by revolutions in France, Germany, and Italy and the rise of abolitionism. In the United States, feminist activism took root when female abolitionists sought to apply the concepts of freedom and equality to their own social and political situations. Their work brought them in contact with female abolitionists in England who were reaching the same conclusions. By the mid-19th century, issues surrounding feminism had added to the tumult of social change, with ideas being exchanged across Europe and North America.

In the first feminist article she dared sign with her own name, Louise Otto, a German, built on the work of Charles Fourier, a French social theorist, quoting his dictum that “by the position which women hold in a land, you can see whether the air of a state is thick with dirty fog or free and clear.” And after Parisian feminists began publishing a daily newspaper entitled La Voix des femmes (“The Voice of Women”) in 1848, Luise Dittmar, a German writer, followed suit one year later with her journal, Soziale Reform.