The Mommy Brain

Research has been published that appears to show having children makes the female of the species smarter, according to the new book, The Mommy Brain.

Science writer Katherine Ellison has marshaled evidence to argue that what seems like an impaired brain to a frazzled mother is actually a brain growing more complex. That what people dismiss as women's work - the mundane, repetitive chores, the endless nurturing and negotiation - combines with a flood of hormones to reshape the brain. That after childbirth, women can emerge with a brain that is more efficient, perceptive and resilient.

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In one experiment, Kinsley compared two groups of rats, one lactating, the other childless. All were deprived of food, the virgin rats starved twice as long to make them more motivated. Then both groups were given a chance to hunt crickets. <snip> It turned out the bachelorette rats needed nearly five minutes to catch their dinner. The mommy rats? Seventy seconds. The scientists discovered that mother rats were generally "less stressed than their single counterparts, which made them bolder and more adventurous. When mommy and virgin rats were plopped into a new environment to locate a hard-to-find Fruit Loop, the moms whipped the virgins. On dissection, the mothers' brains were found to contain more dendrites, treelike extensions from the neurons that are important in learning.

Not everyone is as taken with this book as CBS News and the New York Times are.

Nicholas Stix, in Mens News Daily, reviews the book. His first comment is that the increase in "smartness" on the part of fathers gets ignored. He then seizes on the notion that motherhood is "commonly envisioned" as degrading a woman's intelligence.

“Commonly envisioned”? By whom? I don’t know any people like that. But I used to. Feminists have long seen children as an awful obstacle, indeed, the chief hindrance to women realizing their destiny as corporate lawyers. Children keep women down, and as one feminist wrote a few years ago, talking to her baby was the least interesting part of her day. (I can’t recall her exact words, but her interest in interacting with her child was on a par with watching paint dry.) How was it that a leading academic abortion advocate always referred to the unborn child in an expectant mother’s womb? Ah, yes. "Trespasser."

Several people have observed that "feminism" as it developed in the 70s might be more properly termed "masculinism". Looking at the words of the feminists of this era, one would think that feminists disdain those aspects of humanity that are distinctly feminine; those that are distinctly masculine are placed on a pedestal. As a result, motherhood and domesticity are equated to slavery and the status of "brood mare", and working out of the home is prized.

We also saw a period in which sex differences were denied and the dogma grew up that the only difference between men and women was "the shape of their skin". Thus, women were encouraged to overcome their cultural inhibitions. Women, it was said, would find one-night-stands as pleasurable as men do. After all, any differences in how men and women respond to the same situation is only cultural programming.

It's almost as if an entire movement has been founded on the belief that what men do and feel is good, and what women feel and do is somehow inferior.

The attitude is not new. Before it was called "feminism", it had another name.

"Penis envy."