The Themes of Motherhood and Povertypaper - Essay Example

This paper is based upon the themes of motherhood, emotions, poverty and all the customs of raising children and child survival in a small town in Brazil. The area is described as semifeudal where there are a class of workers living on the verge of poverty and this case study discusses the aspects of their lives. According to statistics one million children below the age of five years pass away because of infectious diseases and malnutrition. Most of these children can be saved by providing them with adequate healthcare thus, this problem comes under the category of politico-economic.

However, poverty has driven these people towards the survival of the fittest. Mothers become increasingly detached from infants who are perceived to be weak to survive the extremely poor conditions and presumed to be a burden on the family. This aspect has been discussed in the paper. The researcher analyzed the reproductive backgrounds of seventy-two women of the small town and tried to discover linkages between the economic and maternal disparity with material and emotional scarcity. The purpose behind this study is to find out the effect of materialism and economic disparity on the social and cultural norms of motherhood, attachment, parting and eventual loss by death.

The researcher wants to prove that these sentiments are a product of the environment or the society a person belongs to rather than an innate psychological feeling of attachment that comes naturally to a mother.His curiosity for this study developed because of two incidents in his life one of a girl from a rural area who murdered her infant son and one-year-old daughter. When he asked her for the reason behind her action she replied, ‘They wouldn’t stop asking for milk and that little one had no feelings.

’ And the second incident which formed the basis of his studies was in a town where there were was a shortage of food, no access to clean drinking water, lack of sanitation and infectious diseases. The writer was involved with helping a woman give birth to her second child.