Chapter 26: Does the World Move After Women Talk? Meaning-Making Processes Around Pregnancy and Childbirth from a Mother–Daughter Conversational Setting¹

What is so special about women’s conversation? Even if we do not take literally José Saramago’s suggestion that “this conversation holds the world in its orbit,” it is true that there is a whole universe inside this particular context. How can this universe be characterized? By which relationships, semiotic hierarchies, modes, and styles is it set up? How does it participate at the level of collective history? Do women create particular mechanisms for cultural transfer?

Knowledge, ideas, wisdom, and emotions transmitted by women had been circumscribed to the private, domestic world, differently from the project men had been building up usually within the public sphere. What does that difference imply? Maybe the dimension of secrecy? Beauvoir mentions the dignity of the “secret science found in oral tradition” (Tardy, 2000). We suggest that there are also implied here a particular kind of power and a particular rhetoric to emphasize the strength and relevance of the transfer of culture—through focusing on the contents and styles of everyday life—by women.