Child Bearing
Although women were important in aspects other than those associated with the ability to bear children, the latter remained a very important part of their lives. The mythology and power associated with the ability to create was one which men tried to emulate. Men would participate in the act of bloodletting their own genitals to create something new from their blood. Instead of giving birth to life they would give birth to new eras through the symbolic gesture of menstruation. This act was highly ritualized; the objects used to pierce the skin were "stingray spines, obsidian blades, or other sharp instruments." The blood was allowed to drip on cloth, which was then burned.
Read more about this topic: Gender In Maya Society
Famous quotes containing the words child and/or bearing:
“When the child is twelve, your wife buys her a splendidly silly article of clothing called a training bra. To train what? I never had a training jock. And believe me, when I played football, I could have used a training jock more than any twelve-year-old needs a training bra.”
—Bill Cosby (20th century)
“It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)