Couvade, a singular and widespread custom among savages in many parts of the world, and regulating the conduct of a father in connection with the birth of a child. In Guiana, even before the child is born, the father abstains from some kinds of animal food. The mother works up to a few hours before the birth, and retires alone, or with some women, to the forest for the birth. In a few hours she returns and resumes her ordinary work.
Meanwhile the father has taken to his hammock, and abstains from every kind of work, from meat and all other food except weak gruel of cassava meal, from smoking, from washing himself, and especially from touching weapons of every kind. During this time, which may extend for weeks, he is fed and cared for by the women. The explanation is unattainable; but the custom appears to imply a mysterious magical and sympathetic connection between father and child, such that if the father infringe the rules of couvade the child suffers. If he eat capybara flesh, the child will have protruding teeth like those of that animal; if he eat an animal with spotted skin, the child will be spotted too. In Guiana the child is not weaned till the third or fourth year. Indians often allege in explanation that the child descends more directly from father than from mother. Some recent anthropologists find the origin of the custom in the transition from the original matriarchal system (see TRIBE), in which descent and inheritance were reckoned through the mother alone, to the patriarchal system. In some places still the father has to buy the child from the mother; among the ancient Romans, the father had to lift the child from the ground. The couvade may therefore be a ceremony by which the father secures and proclaims his property in the new-born child. Diodorus records the custom as in use among the ancient Corsicans; and it has been found by ancient and modern travellers in parts of China, Borneo, Africa, North and South America. The name, now commonly used by anthropologists, is French, being from couver, 'to hatch eggs.' See Tylor, Early History of Mankind (1878); Giraud-Teulon, Lcs Origines de la Famille (1874).