Mother and child disunion: don't take a mother's love for granted

Science News,  March 20, 2004  by Bruce Bower

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Shortly after arriving in Taiwan in 1957, Stanford University anthropologist Arthur Wolf reached the rural village of Hsia-ch'i-chou. There, he met a weathered-looking woman who told an incredible story. Several decades previously, she had given away her five infant daughters and had replaced them with five girls adopted from other families and fated to become wives to her five sons. The friendly, outgoing woman seemed proud of what she'd done, Wolf recalls, adding that she described the dispatching of her babies to new homes as smart household management.

"I gave away all five girls and raised instead wives for my five sons," Wolf remembers her saying. "This saved me [money and ultimately the need to pay dowries] as well as the trouble of arranging 10 marriages." For each marriage of an adult son, for example, she would have had to throw large and expensive feasts, as well as pay a fee to the bride's family.

The same pragmatic outlook characterized many other women whom Wolf encountered in his fieldwork in 11 villages and two small towns in northern Taiwan. To these women, Wolf reports, shipping out their daughters--sometimes to families living just down the road--and adopting future daughters-in-law were the right things to do.

Wolf refers to the outcome of this early childhood matchmaking as minor marriages. The bride in a minor marriage was considered to be a daughter-in-law as soon as she reached her new family, even if she was only a month or two old. An official marriage ceremony occurred shortly after both members of the couple reached puberty.

For several decades, Wolf studied such marriages to test a theory about incest taboos. However, a few years ago, Wolf decided to consider minor marriages from a broader perspective. He sifted through adoption data from 1905 to 1945 for the 13 communities that he had visited, and, with several colleagues, he obtained comparable records for parts of central and southern Taiwan, as well as for the nearby Pescadores Islands.

Many social scientists and biologists, including Wolf, had assumed that natural selection yields women who are disposed to feel a deep attachment to their helpless offspring. After all, babies seem to elicit more love from their mothers with every coo and suckle. And mothers often report intense emotional pain when separated from their babies.

The Taiwanese data threw a monkey wrench into those deeply held assumptions. In northern Taiwan, 3,046 women had given up a majority of their 6,201 daughters for adoption by age 1 and as many as 80 to 90 percent by age 15. A comparable wave of daughter giveaways had occurred in the Pescadores. Given a convenient alternative to raising daughters whom most adults in these locations refer to as "useless things," Wolf says, women willingly relinquish the girls as child brides.

For reasons that remain unclear, minor marriages became popular only in northern Taiwan and the Pescadores. In central and southern Taiwan, most mothers had raised their own daughters. In yet other cultures, mothers might resort to a more extreme measure, such as infanticide, to deal with unwanted children.

In the northern Taiwanese society, the husband controlled family resources and his parents shared the house. Therefore, the raising of daughters-in-law may have provided the mothers with much-needed allies. This practice also helped these mothers preserve their sons' loyalty. Otherwise, a grown son might marry a woman who would convince him to promote her ideas on how to run the household, leaving his parents at her mercy.

The unusual practice of minor marriage, chronicled in the Dec. 2003 Current Anthropology, highlights what Wolf calls a stimulating contradiction: Although intense maternal sentiments typically weld mothers to their offspring, when socially acceptable alternatives are available, women often give away children they don't need.

It seems that bearing and caring for a child aren't sufficient to arouse a mother's love, Wolf concludes. Some unrecognized force may be at play, but he's not sure what it could be.

"Maternal sentiments are not as compelling as they are commonly reputed to be," Wolf says. "We have to take seriously the possibility that they're not innate."

MOTHER NURTURE An old margarine commercial whimsically noted that it's not nice to fool with Mother Nature. Wolf agrees. When he went to Taiwan, he had no intention of toppling the current scientific thinking about innate maternal sentiments.

The Asian island initially appealed to Wolf as a natural laboratory for testing a biological theory of the incest taboo. Proposed more than 80 years ago by Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck, the theory states that infants raised together would find it difficult to form sexual feelings for one another as adults, regardless of their genetic relationship. Natural selection preserved this innate response, Westermarck argued, because it guards against incestuous couplings, which increase the odds of defective offspring.