By Virginia McConnell Simmons
While I was reading about African elephants, I wondered about certain differences and resemblances between elephant and human families.
In Louisa May Alcott’s well-known Little Women, Marmee goes on at Orchard House, wisely and gently tending to her brood while Father is far away doing man things. Anthropologists would call Marmee’s family matrilocal – a mother with her own children – although Father does return happily in Alcott’s story, thus making it a conjugal or nuclear family in the end.