Couvade

COUVADE

Couvade is a kinship usage reported among primitive tribes like the Khasi and the Toda. The practice consists of making a husband live as an invalid along with his wife whenever she gives birth to a child. He refrains from active life, goes on a sick diet and observes certain taboos.

This kinship usage involving wife and husband has been explained in various ways. Some authorities have seen the survival of the traditional stage of the maternal-paternal complex in it. In the maternal-paternal stage, where residents may be matrilocal but inheritance patrilineal, or conversely, some conventional methods of ascertaining paternity are needed, the father is confined in a room or the customary bow and arrow ceremony of the Toda. Malinowski believed couvades to be a cementing bond of married life and a social mechanism designed to secure paternal affection. Raglan regards it as an irrational belief that may be prior to marriage and even a contributory cause of the emergence of marriage as an institution.

Some writers have sought a psycho-analytical explanation. They have attributed this usage to the husband’s desire to lighten the wife’s discomforts through participation through identification.