Thus in California, when the mother is delivered, the father is content to keep to the house and abstain from eating fish and meat.[1]
Among various tribes of South America the husband of the woman limits the practice to a few hygienic precautions; this is the couvade reduced to its simplest expression.[2]
This custom was found in Asia, among the Tartars, by Marco Polo. It still exists in Bengal, among the Larkas, although attenuated; on the occasion of a birth the parents quit the house, the wife and husband are both declared unclean for eight days, and during that time the husband cooks the food. After which the masculine filiation of the child is proclaimed by solemnly giving him the name of his grandfather.[3] We shall be mistaken if we imagine that the couvade is special to very inferior races. The Greco-Roman writers have quoted a certain number of examples observed among the barbarians of the ancient world. Strabo relates that the Iberian women, after the example of those of the Celts, Thracians, and Scythians, quit their beds as soon as they are delivered, and give them up to their husbands, whom they tend.[4] Diodorus tells us that in Corsica, after a woman has given birth to a child, the husband goes to bed as if he were ill, and he remains there an appointed number of days like a lying-in woman.[5]
In his Argonautica Apollonius of Rhodes speaks of a people of Tibarenedes, on the north-west coast of Asia Minor, who had the custom of the couvade: "As soon as the married women are delivered, their husbands groan, lie on beds, and cover their heads. All this time their wives give them strengthening food, and prepare baths for them suitable for lying-in women."[6] It is probable that more than one trace of this "lying-in" still exists in Europe, in superstitious and popular practices. Quite recently a Russian has informed me that it is still in use in the Baltic provinces, but naturally in a form of survival in
