My body is the picture of my love
That a woman has enormous influence over her body through her feelings is obvious. Eileen, who although married for twelve years had never fallen in love, left her husband and fell in love with Martin. She says, “Within a month of beginning our relationship, despite attempts at birth control, I became pregnant. My breasts swelled and my period was missed. During the following month the symptoms gradually disappeared. My breasts became normal and I had a natural period. Out of this I realised that because I loved Martin I deeply wanted his baby, and this desire, that I certainly had not previously admitted to myself, had produced all the physical signs of pregnancy.”
Could this level of passionate involvement with her man, have led early women to extend their oestrus, and finally transcend it altogether? Whatever the details are in this magnificent love story, the change occurred. As it did so it brought with it possibilities that are the foundations of humanness. Life-long mating is shared by other animals, notably some species of birds, but the ability to transcend the environment and the seasons, which conditions mating and birth in animals, gave human beings the capacity to have a new relationship with the world and each other. The herbivores for instance, whose every drive, instinctive as it is, locks them into particular activities at given times of year, have little space to develop any sense of separateness, any feeling of personal identity or will.
