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Assig. 4 Karla Flores

The concept of Motherhood is discussed, both in Frederici and Morgan’s works. Both of them addressed different time periods in which the concept was being developed differently. In “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Difference”, Frederici takes a more modern approach to the concept of motherhood. She starts to discuss how the women were already being controlled alone with their bodies. After the Black Plague, natives were dying or even killed by the Europeans, who had brought this burden to them. But in order to keep the population balanced, as people were dying more needed to be born. But after the oppresion society had been onder, specially women, they had decided to take stand up for themselves and protest in some way. The introduction of birth control was now a new cause for society to attack women for wanting to control their bodies. Women were trying to decide amongst themselves when they wanted to be mothers or if they wanted to at all. But now it would be almost impossible for them to take those decisions themselves. Pregnancies started to be almost a requirement for women. But in the other hand we have Jennifer Morgan, in “Some could suckle over their shoulder”, discussing the base for how motherhood was seen in a much earlier time. In around the 1500’s , conquistadors were criticizing women in the new lands for how they maintained their bodies. They described how it was nothing to these women when it came to giving birth. They continued to describe with very degrading words, how to them these women were having basically animals. Motherhood was said to be absent from this time, which was something just outrageous for these Europeans. It could had been better one of the main reasons as to why women started to be controlled when it came to pregnancies and the way they were mothers