The Matriarch Meetings
The Matriarch Meetings
This auditory interview project was inspired by an evolutionary theory called The Grandmother Hypothesis. This project focuses on children's relationships with their grandmothers from a young age, and how that dynamic changes as both grandmothers and grandchildren grow older. It's a study into how grandmother's provide childcare support, but ultimately require support in return. The point of this project is to observe how families, particularly grandchildren, cope with this change.
The Grandmother Hypothesis
The Grandmother Hypothesis is a evolutionary theory to explain why grandmother exist. Humans are the only primates where the females live for a significant period after they leave child bearing age. The Grandmother Hypothesis proposes that human grandmothers evolved to provide child care support for younger mothers, because human children are so costly to raise.
Feminist Perspective
Although the Grandmother Hypothesis is a biological theory, it has social implications. While grandmothers may have evolved because it was evolutionarily beneficial to have support while raising children, therefore favoring bloodlines with females who live longer, it would be a flawed train of logic to assume that older women only value or purpose in life is to provide childcare support. Older women are experienced, diverse human beings who hold value in what they create, learn, and think about just like every other human being on the planet. To reduce them into a grandmother box would not only be a disservice to them, but a loss for everyone else.