Social Dynamics of Adolescent Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa (1993) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
4 REPRODUCTIVE ENTITLEMENT: THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF FERTILITY AND PARENTHOOD
4 REPRODUCTIVE ENTITLEMENT: THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF FERTILITY AND PARENTHOOD
Pages 69-88
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 69... ...
Most family planning programs, however, encounter reactions ranging from polite interest to resentment.) Why are some of these reactions so strong?
|
From page 70... ...
As Chapter 3 explains, a premarital birth, the variable that this report has taken as its initial focus, is not necessarily unsanctioned, so long as the father acknowledges his paternity. We therefore treat an increase in premarital births as a possible indicator of a more serious change: a rise in unsanctioned births that occur either without paternal recognition, or outside of what is considered the proper life cycle phase.
|
From page 71... ...
point out that African societies attempt to "make full use of the reproductive lives of their females" (1986:2901. Polygynous marriage and the welding of the complex kinship ties it created were among the most important strategies a man could employ to build a prestigious personal career.
|
From page 72... ...
In eastern and southern Africa a barren woman had failed to fulfill her obligation in life; her condition was viewed as a punishment from the gods or the ancestors or as the result of witchcraft (Kershaw, 1973; Mwambia, 1973; Ngubane, 19771. Many societies buried childless women with minimal respect if not with contempt: Their bodies were sometimes mutilated (for the Yoruba of Nigeria, see Caldwell and Caldwell, 1985; for the Gusii of Kenya, see Mayer, 19731.
|
From page 73... ...
Jobs, scholarships, money, and land are dispensed through personal ties to powerful mediators who can maneuver within government bureaucracies to obtain resources for their dependents. With precipitous declines in national economies, people have an even greater need for patrons well connected to the urban and government bureaucracies to help them bypass cumbersome channels during shortages, and to provide them with crucial ties to the international world for travel, jobs, and access to hard foreign currency.
|
From page 74... ...
. it is truly during adolescence that the traditional African society proceeds to a sort of renewal of each child in order to prepare him not only to face this crucial period as someone who is informed, but especially to give the basis of his adult life .
|
From page 75... ...
He had been trained as a warrior and had acquired basic productive skills and religious knowledge. He had been allowed an indulgent, but not usually sexual, friendship with a girl from his peer group in early adolescence, and had been betrothed for a marriage that would not take place until he was considered fully mature, with his own house and gardens, in his late twenties.
|
From page 76... ...
So intense was this emphasis on proper preparation for reproduction that in many cases it strongly affected the interpretations local people placed on modern innovations. Among the Bangangte of Cameroon, Feldman-Savelsberg (1989)
|
From page 77... ...
Although many African societies allowed and even encouraged young men to be sexually expressive, they were not necessarily entitled yet to procreate. Sexual expression might precede marriage, but it was held in check by various means until reproduction could legitimately ensue.
|
From page 78... ...
Other constraints within marriage applied in western African societies in which women marry at very early ages. Such sanctions characterized especially those societies influenced by Islamic doctrine, which employed early marriage to assuage worries about female sexual purity and unsanctioned births (see Dupire, 1963, for the Fulani in Niger, and Schildkrout, 1983, for the Hausa in northern Nigeria)
|
From page 79... ...
In the meanwhile, the bride might live with her parents, while the husband paid bridewealth installments and she matured. The following excerpts from a woman's life history in rural Sierra Leone vividly highlight some analogous patterns in a different cultural setting (Bledsoe, unpublished field notes, 1982~.
|
From page 80... ...
, have pointed out that there were often important differences between "prenuptial" births or pregnancies and "extramarital" births in general. The implication is that a premarital birth or pregnancy to a couple who intends to marry bears considerably less stigma than a birth occurring wholly outside the realm of marital intentions.
|
From page 81... ...
Just as fears of reproduction during unsanctioned states made people devise creative protective measures for young women, so was young men's behavior channeled. In eastern and southern African societies, adolescent boys were taught how to have sexual relations between the thighs of their girlfriends, so as to prevent the pregnancy that was the sole prerogative of the girls' eventual husbands, older and more powerful men, to initiate.
|
From page 82... ...
In sum, the expression of sexuality and reproduction were culturally endorsed; but they were supposed to occur only within sanctioned states. Indeed, a theme that emerges repeatedly in ethnographies of the past is the number of socially defined obstacles to reproduction: injunctions to delay the expression of sexuality until after initiation, to avoid reproductive sexual relations with an inappropriate partner, to postpone full sexual exposure for an immature married girl, and to observe postpartum abstinence during breastfeeding.
|
From page 83... ...
Many studies of the present allude to increasing sexual activity and unsanctioned reproduction among unmarried adolescents. Some are based on assertions that experiments in nonreproductive sexuality have declined (Kenyatta, 1971; Launay, forthcoming)
|
From page 84... ...
The observations by David and Voas (1981:658) of the Fulani of Cameroon reflect the general attitude toward male sexuality: "There is no expectation that young men remain celibate before marriage, nor is any value placed upon the fidelity of married men, particularly when away from home." Throughout the region, full premarital sexual relations of men are now taken virtually for granted.
|
From page 85... ...
. A Norma man complained that the father of his daughter's child was "just a boy," and therefore not able to marry or take on responsibility for the child; and in western Nigeria, members of the older generation charge that an increase in sexual expression is one effect of unemployment for youths- youths with "nothing to do" (Guyer, unpublished field notes)
|
From page 86... ...
Patterns of initiating sexual relations slowly after marriage to a young bride may be disappearing, resulting in acute health risks for young women. In The Gambia, a young woman declared that a husband may try to take possession of his bride sooner than in the past by withholding bridewealth until he gains full access, thereby forcing financially hard-pressed parents to turn over their daughter sooner than they would have in the past (Bledsoe, unpublished field notes, 1992~.
|
From page 87... ...
The limited information that we have about young men gives us more perspective on two things: the intensity of sexual demand on teenage women, and the likelihood that a father will recognize and support his children. Although adolescent boys are still considered too young for socially sanctioned reproduction, the more they enter full sexual activity, the more likely will their young partners bear children outside a sanctioned state, whether this consists of marriage, completed initiation, or paternal .
|
From page 88... ...
Having described some of the ways in which reproduction is legitimated through ritual preparation or learning, proven fealty to in-laws, or the acknowledgment of paternity, we turn to a new domain of preparation for adulthood that has received disproportionate research attention in fertility studies: formal schooling. Although past modes of preparation are increasingly being eclipsed to make room in childhood for schooling, Chapter 5 shows that the longstanding cultural emphasis on delaying parenthood to complete preparation for adult life persists with surprising vigor in this new cultural form, which has in effect become a new form of nonreproductive training for adult life.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.