TODAY’S working mother model is deeply embedded in human nature. Our hunter-gatherer maternal ancestors may not have had briefcases or paychecks, but they also left their infants and young children in the care of others. Human child-rearing has always been cooperative. The woman who remains home with her children is doing something unnatural.

These are the key ideas in a new book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, according to Melvin Konner’s recent review in The New York Review of Books. Konner, the Harvard-educated pop anthropologist, writes:

[T]he working mother has always been a central part of the human scene, and the classic stay-at-home mom of 1950s television may have been limited to Western cultures in that era. Women gathered, gardened, farmed, fished, built huts, made clothing and other necessities, even hunted in some cultures, in addition to caring for children and performing other domestic duties. Mothers often could not discharge these duties without help. Our species is not unique in caring for offspring cooperatively, but our great ape cousins don’t do it, and we take it to extraordinary levels.

Konner’s review contains other staples of feminist anthrolopology. Men weren’t necessarily the earliest inventors. Women made sticks and infant slings but they were destroyed and these tools cannot be studied. Also, men were not dominant in hunter-gatherer societies. Decisions were made by “consensus,” but it was the views of women that were the most important. Read More »

[NOTE: The below report has been updated to fully include all the new information available in the 2010 Preliminary Birth Data report.]

JESSE POWELL writes:

The National Center for Health Statistics has released the Final Birth Data for 2009 and the Preliminary Birth Data for 2010. The pattern of “risk aversion” presumably in response to the economic crisis is continuing. The ratio of births out-of-wedlock grew slowly from 2007 to 2010 but during this period fertility and the proportion of women of reproductive age who were married fell sharply. “Risk Aversion” can explain the decline in fertility among both married and unmarried women as well as a reluctance to get married which might explain the proportion of women who are married accelerating its long standing decline.

Since 2007, the United States has seen a sharp fall in its fertility rate. Looking specifically at the white population in the United States in 1940, during the Great Depression just after World War II started, the white Total Fertility Rate (TFR) was 2.229 children per woman. This rate then grew steadily reaching a peak in 1957 at the height of the Baby Boom with a white TFR of 3.625. After 1957 the fertility rate then fell steadily, plumbing the depths with a rate of 1.652 children per woman in 1976, the absolute low-point of white fertility up to this time. After 1976, white fertility slowly but persistently crept upwards reaching a high of 1.908 children per woman in 2007. In the three years since 2007, however, the white fertility rate has dropped sharply hitting a TFR of 1.791 in 2010; the lowest fertility rate since 1997.

In the past three years, from 2007 to 2010, the white TFR has fallen by 6%; for blacks it has fallen by 8% and for Hispanics it has fallen by an amazing 17%. In 2010 the Hispanic TFR rate was only 12% above replacement level. If the Total Fertility Rate among Hispanics falls as quickly from 2010 to 2012 as it did from 2008 to 2010 then in 2012 the Hispanic TFR will be 2.05, below replacement level. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Your recent remark about vile crimes perpetrated by blacks and the absence of outrage against them prompted these thoughts. I write from the city of St. Louis, which is notorious for being infested with crime, most of it perpetrated by young black males. The mayor and all public officials know this to be true but do everything they can to deny it and whitewash it.

I have read many issues of The St. Louis Police Journal from 80-100 years ago. It is refreshing to see how crime was reported and dealt with then, as against how it is not reported and dealt with by today’s “newspapers” and “law enforcement” agencies drunk on diversity-and-multiculti worship.  

In each weekly issue of the Police Journal, a wealth of details was reported in plain language in two justified columns of fine print on every page. The men who wrote and published the Police Journal were not diversity-and-multiculti worshippers. They did not stop to worry whether what they wrote might “offend” anyone, least of all criminal thugs.   Read More »

THOSE readers still undecided as to how to stuff their Thanksgiving bird may wish to consider this recipe. I have not tried it, but it looks sensational. You might consider adding a pound of cubed mozzarella.

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Laughing Peasant Woman, Albrecht Durer, 1505

JOHN E. writes:

Dr. Rummler’s theory of why people used not to smile for photographs doesn’t explain all of the drawings and paintings from the past, also typically void of the pearly whites. If teeth were considered so essential to a person’s representation in a visual, they could have been sketched in, even if the subject being painted was in actuality all gums.

This reminds me of a passage I read in Dostoevsky’s A Raw Youth. The protagonist remarks to his father how much a photographed portrait resembles the protagonist’s mother. The father answers, making the point that it is rare that a photograph will show a person’s characteristic appearance:

J.N., who is a man, writes in response to this entry:

I’d really appreciate it if women would start raising fashion standards among other women, especially in church. Many women dress modestly, but there are some who come to worship God in very short skirts and tight, thin, low-cut blouses. And it’s not just the young ladies doing it — I’ve seen middle-aged mothers dress this way, too. Read More »

THE reasons why women cannot be – and should not be – priests are rooted in biology, psychology, ethics and metaphysical reality. In this entry, Kristor expands on the subject. The position of priest is not simply one of privilege, it is a form of sacrifice. He writes: Read More »

FROM SHEWIRED.COM’S most recent list of the 100 most “courageous” homosexuals:

An Episcopalian priest, Rev. Dr. Katherine Ragsdale (right) served for 17 years on the national board for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. She drew fire in 2009 from religious conservatives when she called abortion a “blessing” and the doctors who perform them “heroes.” This year, she and fellow Episcopalian priest Rev. Mally Lloyd were married at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston by Bishop M. Thomas Shaw on New Year’s Day.

This is modern-day spinsterhood at its finest. It’s what every little girl dreams of, isn’t it? To be photographed dressed up in old furs kissing another spinster. As for the church that accepts these lesbians as priestesses, well, let’s just say it’s finished, a force for evil instead of good. It’s what my grandmother would have called “a school for spinsters.”

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IN OUR perverse world, evil often wears the face of a good-hearted man. At VFR, Lawrence Auster writes about the French official who defended the decision to allow a 17-year-old boy who had raped a girl free without warning others of his record. The rapist was accepted to a private school, where he raped and murdered a 13-year-old girl:

RANDY BROWNING writes:

This weekend slapped me into a reality for which I was not fully prepared. I was going through a couple sales magazines for two major department chains in the area, and was shocked at the subtlety of the change in poses. The women had achieved what looked to be masculine stature, while the men were deliberately posed in the effeminate. One of these retailers had obviously resisted the PC movement, but has recently taken to a 50/50 display of people of color (not reflected by the same percentages of residents in this state). Read More »

THE CATHOLIC PRIEST today, in violation of many centuries of tradition, often finds himself surrounded on the altar by women and girls. This relatively recent innovation has changed the entire tone and symbolism of the liturgy. Women naturally, through their faces, their voices, their gestures and clothes, draw attention to themselves. Many women who serve as lectors, cantors or Eucharistic ministers are highly respectful in their demeanour and attire, but even so their presence is distracting. And some are not highly respectful. Female cantors are prone to project themselves excessively, making performance out of their role, their audience (and that is what a congregation is reduced to – an audience) captive to amateurish theatricals.

As I explain in the previous entry, there were many reasons why women were excluded altogether from the altar in the past. Only a philistine would view these traditions as scorn for women.

Some people say that declining vocations justify the presence of women on the altar. In fact, it is much more likely, if not certain, that the predominance of women leads to declining vocations. Men will never be drawn to the priesthood in large numbers if they must be adjuncts to women in their most visible role. To the modern man, holiness and manliness seem at odds – he may be hellishly torn between these contradictory drives – because of the loss of male authority and hierarchy. The effusive, emotion-drenched atmosphere of contemporary Christianity is like a gauntlet thrown down before him, a challenge to his elemental, irrefutable identity as a man.

The masculinity of the priesthood has been severely undermined, so much so that the issue of whether women should be priests seems all but settled, and this represents a crisis of monumental proportions.

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JENNIFER ZICKEL is outraged because her daughters will not be able to serve as altar girls at the Corpus Christi Catholic church in the Arlington, Virginia area. The pastor has ended the practice, returning to the traditional custom of altar boys, and there is very little protest. Nevertheless, The Washington Post writesof the dissatisfaction of Zickel and a few others. Even though women typically outnumber men on altars in Catholic churches, and the Novus Ordo liturgy is often infused with a feminine, heart-throbbing sensibility, Zickel ran out of church in tears when she learned her little girls will not be altar servers someday, as if she had been told they would be forcibly confined to convents for the rest of their lives.

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IT WOULD be difficult to find a public figure today wearing an expression of convincing severity and authority such as Winston Churchill wore in this 1941 photo. It’s true, those were serious times. But these are serious times too and he wore a similar expression long before the war.

We are surrounded by vapid smiles (see this official photo of Obama) – smiles on newscasters, politicians, journalists, priests, intellectuals. An age of radical democracy is one in which power is diffused and virility demonized. Noxious sentimentality masks the emptiness once occupied by men. Read More »

First Mate Piggy of the USS Swinetrek.

ALAN writes:

You asked in a recent post: “When did it become unacceptable to have one’s picture taken without an enormous grin?”

Excellent question.  

Tentative answer: About the time when TV stations began to feature “happy talk” in their news reports. I distinctly remember my reaction to that at the time (more than 35 years ago). It was, I thought, the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen: Grown men and women whose job was to report the news were now making cutesy-poo “happy talk.” It was, I said to myself, a sure sign that American culture was descending into infantilism.   Read More »

THE latest fad in public education is eliminating cursive penmanship, a move that Linda Schrock Taylor at LewRockwell.com says represents “literacy’s last hurrah.” Cursive helps children learn to read. She writes:

As a child does cursive writing, the rhythmic and purposeful movements of the hand and pencil echo and reinforce the child’s thoughts and speech, matching and practicing those two basic and automatically acquired skills. Read More »

A Congressional spending bill released on Monday would allow schools to define pizza as a vegetable under Department of Agriculture regulations. This is long overdue recognition that in the Age of Pizza, pizza is a vegetable.

Pizza is a vegetable in the same way pea pods and squash are vegetables. Pizza grows on thick green stalks that come from tiny pizza seeds (under a magnifying glass they look like tiny pies). Read More »