“For though Chineses go to bed
And lie in, in their ladies’ stead,
And, for the pains they took before,
Are nurs’d and pamper’d to do more.”
On this remarks Dr. Zachary Grey[118]:—
“The Chinese men of quality, when their wives are brought to bed, are nursed and tended with as much care as women here, and are supplied with the best strengthening and nourishing diet in order to qualify them for future services.” This is the custom of the Brazilians, if we may believe Masseus, who observes, “that women in travail are delivered without great difficulty, and presently go about their household business: the husband in her stead keepeth his bed, is visited by his neighbours, hath his broths made him, and junkets sent to comfort him.”
“Among the Iroquois, a mother who shrieks during her labour is forbidden to bear other children, and some of the South American Indians killed the children of the mothers who shrieked, from the belief that they will grow up to be cowards.”[119]
The origin of the couvade is not to be traced to the father and mother, says Starcke; it has to do simply with the well-being of the child. The father’s powers of endurance, tested so severely as we have seen, are believed to be assured to the child.[120]
Max Müller traces the origin of the couvade to the derision of friends of both sexes.
Dobrizhoffen says of the Abipones:[121] “They comply with this custom with the greater care and readiness because they believe that the father’s rest and abstinence have an extraordinary effect on the well-being of new-born infants, and is, indeed, absolutely necessary for them. For they are quite convinced that any unseemly act on the father’s part would injuriously affect the child on account of the sympathetic tie which naturally subsists between them, so that in the event of the child’s death the women all blame the self-indulgence of the father, and find fault with this or that act.”