This week, Peter Matthiessen joins us in Table Talk. Share thoughts and ask questions about "The Jungle Book" and its influence on the author in the Books area.

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R E C E N T L Y

"Jungle Book" fever
By Peter Matthiessen
How a childhood spent reading Kipling's wondrous tales gave a writer his spots -- India, Siberia, Africa
(03/23/99)

A life without play dates
By Yona Zeldis McDonough
Arthur the aardvark's parent-free life
(03/22/99)

The nurture assumption
By Jennifer Kahn
Some women just don't want to have kids. So why does that make us abnormal?
(03/19/99)

Is that all there is?
By Anne Lamott
Explaining death and the hereafter to a kid who wants to be cryogenically frozen
(03/18/99)

Blarney for bairns
By Polly Shulman
Forget the leprechauns -- it's irreverence, mythologies and assistant pig-keepers that make Irish stories spellbinding for kids
(03/17/99)

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BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

----------The evidence is in: Old mothers live|
----------longer and are smarter than the rest of us. |

BY MICHELE Y. PRIDMORE-BROWN | When Virginia Woolf was told that female brains were smaller than male brains and therefore less capable, she retorted that science was infected with the patriarchal virus. For centuries, this virus not only rendered female brains unworthy of study, it also influenced medical and popular attitudes about pregnancy and motherhood.

Not that long ago, delaying motherhood to pursue work or an education was viewed with skepticism, if not outright hostility. Concerned grandmothers were likely to take an aspiring careerist aside and stage-whisper that, if she put off babies for her work -- or God forbid, an advanced degree -- her ovaries might just shrivel up. In the early part of this century, medics intimated that delaying motherhood could lead to all kinds of nervous diseases, including false or hysteric pregnancies known as "puff" babies. Teddy Roosevelt singled out mothers of big families as the ultimate role models for young women. In a 1903 presidential address, he claimed that any woman who balked at having children was a "criminal against the race" and an "object of contemptuous abhorrence."

Women can heave a collective sigh of relief that sociocultural mores about late motherhood have changed, thanks largely to the women's movement. Still, some gray-haired mothers who find themselves panting after toddlers may still wonder what shape they'll be in when their kids hit the teen years. After all, don't young mothers sail unscathed through pregnancy and the postpartum period with rubber band waists, while their older counterparts face a higher incidence of varicose veins, high blood pressure, gestational diabetes and other complications? Is early motherhood better for your body? Not necessarily, according to a series of recent studies on aging and reproduction. They suggest that it behooves women to do what growing numbers of them are doing anyway: Have children late and infrequently.

European researchers, drawing on 12 centuries of genealogical records of the British aristocracy, have shown a clear tradeoff between early childbearing and longevity. In an article published last December in Nature, two gerontologists at the University of Manchester found that women who delay having children until their 30s and 40s, and then have only one or two, are more likely to live into their 80s, 90s and beyond. Female longevity, they say, is linked to the number of children a woman has and her age at the birth of her first child. This study comes in the wake of another carried out in the Boston area by a team of Harvard researchers led by Thomas T. Perls. It showed that centenarians are four times more likely than the general population to have had their first child in their 40s.

Consider the late Madame Jeanne Calment of Arles, France. Despite eating two pounds of chocolate a week and smoking until the age of 117 (when she reportedly stopped because she could no longer light up unaided), she managed to make it to a record-breaking 122 years. University of Georgia gerontologist Daniel Promislow speculates that her long life may well have been due, at least in part, to her having only one child.

Reading these studies, I also found myself thinking of my 80-year-old mother, who is still out on the tennis court lobbing backhands past opponents half her age. In the past, I had attributed her seemingly eternal youth to her hardy Swiss genes -- though her parents died young and looked their age. But maybe the answer lies more in my belated entrance into her life: She had me at the age of 45.

N E X T_ P A G E: The best bet for long life: No kids