Broodmales

In the folk customs of couvade—"brooding" or "hatching"—practiced around the world, a man takes on the specific sexual and emotional events of a woman's body so that her experience becomes his. He becomes pregnant, writhes in labor, nurses the child, suffers postpartum fatigue—in short, is a male mother.

Nor Hall's "Men in Childbirth" introduces Dawson. She frames his explorations with data about social anthropologists at the turn of the century and then looks inward at the experiences grounding the customs of couvade they labeled bizarre. Dreams, bodily sensations, and "pathological" cases affirm the continuing practice of couvade today.

Dawson's ethnological classic collects material painstakingly complied from accounts of explorers and informants from the 1700's to the 1900's. Men lying in hammocks sprinkled with cayenne pepper, isolated in dark huts, running around the hearth with a baby strapped to the chest, building twing bridges for infant souls.