From Mother to Daughter: The Passing of Fertility.

Agnes Fine, Veronique Moulinie & Jean-Claude Sangoi, From Mother to Daughter:The Passing of Fertility. - Recent surveys conducted in France have exposed the feeling of shame experienced by women who were pregnant at an age considered by themselves and by those around them to be too late in life. The unspoken norms related to the age deemed suitable for procreation have been brought to light, specifically a norm that literally prohibited women from being mothers again once they were old enough to be grandmothers. The anthropologists and demographers who have written this article show the implication of these norms for the succession of generations, in particular the passing of the power of sexual reproduction from mother to daughter. This analysis draws on several sources and on a comparison with the practices and beliefs studied by ethnologists in African societies of the past and present. Thanks to sources in historical demography and its tools, evidence is presented about this prohibition and its frequency in two rural areas in southwestern France during the XIXth century. The conclusion raises questions about the survival and current transformation of these implicit norms, and discusses both the new approaches opened by this research for historical demography and, more broadly, the theoretical implications for the social sciences.