Mark Liberman has
posted on Deborah Solomon's interview with Louann Brizendine in
Sunday's NYT Magazine (p.
22), focusing on her conversion of her earlier claim about differences
in words spoken per day between women and men to a claim about
"communication events" per day. There's a lot more on comment on
in this piece, but I was especially struck by another Brizendinism,
another remarkable statistic, in the piece:
So much for the complex story of relations between women and men
throughout history. What I'm going to focus on is the claim about
pregnancy rates: between 17 and 22 pregnancies per lifetime? Where does she GET these statistics?
Two side issues... First, it's not entirely clear how "in the
1700s and 1800s" is to be understood in relation to "before birth
control": is she focusing on this time period (the 1700s and 1800s) as
a period before birth control (most likely), or as the period when
birth control became common (which would be suggested by the reference
to Socrates, who was definitely well before the 18th century).
Second, why the restriction to middle-class women? My guess is
that she has some source that addresses middle-class women (presumably
in cultures where "middle-class" makes sense as a social category) in
the 18th and 19th centuries.
Now, Brizendine has a source problem. She is not herself a
scientist -- she does no research of her own (in the Solomon interview,
she maintains that she does no clinical research because she objects to
placebos, as being cruel) -- but a clinician (she has clients/patients,
not subjects), and she gets all her data from what she
reads. As Mark has observed, again and again, she relies
heavily on pop literature rather than the scientific literature for her
statistics. So we are entitled to wonder where the 17-22
pregnancies-per-liftetime figure comes from. It certainly seems
very high indeed.
My guess is that this figure is an estimate of how many pregnancies a
woman would have during 35 to 40 years of fertility (and sexual
activity) if absolutely no steps were taken to limit pregnancies and
she herself survived all those childbirths. Neither of these
assumptions is realistic; women have always used various means to limit
pregnancies, and death in childbirth has been common until fairly
recently.
I've mentioned my Swiss great-grandmother who had 14 children (some
born dead). Those 14 pregnancies were spread over a 33-year
period, so that there was an average of 2.35 years between
pregnancies. This happens to be the spacing for a woman with 40
fertile years and 17 pregnancies. Assuming fewer fertile
years and more than 17 pregnancies gives smaller spacings, down to 1.59
years for 22 pregnancies in 35 fertile years.
Brizendine's statistics strike me as about as believable as the
following datum, which came to me in spam this morning: