mones. Then some Demeter girls start yearning to become pregnant.
If other aspects of her life are empty and she is herself little more
than a neglected child, a young Demeter who has been coerced into
sex and becomes pregnant may welcome the child. One pregnant
fourteen-year-old girl at a shelter for unwed mothers said, “When
other girls my age wanted bicycles or other things, I always wanted
a baby of my own. I’m happy I’m pregnant.”
However, most Demeter adolescents do not become pregnant.
Lacking Hera’s deep wish to be part of a couple or Aphrodite’s
erotic drives, Demeter is not motivated to have early sexual experi-
ence.
Many Demeters marry young. In working-class families, a girl
may be encouraged to get married right after high school. This push
may fit with a girl’s own Demeter proclivities to have a family rather
than an education or a job.
If a young Demeter woman does not marry and begin a family,
she will go to work or college. In college, she will probably take
courses geared toward preparing her to enter a helping profession.
A Demeter woman is not typically ambitious, intellectual, or com-
petitive for grades, though she may do well is she’s bright and inter-
ested in her classes. Status, which Hera women find important, is
inconsequential to a Demeter. Her friends are often chosen across a
wide social and racial range. She will go out of her way to make an
ill-at-ease foreign student feel comfortable, to aid a physically han-
dicapped student, and to help a social misfit.
WORK
The maternal nature of the Demeter woman predisposes her to
enter the nurturing or helping professions. She is drawn toward
“traditionally feminine” jobs such as teaching, social work, or nurs-
ing. Helping people to get well or grow is a satisfaction and an un-
derlying motivation when Demeter is present. Women who become
psychotherapists, physical therapists, rehabilitation therapists, or
pediatricians are often expressing some Demeter inclinations in their
occupational choice. Many women volunteers at nursery schools
and elementary schools, at hospitals and nursing homes, also are
putting their Demeter tendencies to work.
Demeter: Goddess of Grain, Nurturer and Mother