mama's baby, papa's maybe

English

Phrase

mama's baby, papa's maybe

1. It is easy to know the biological mother of a child, but difficult to be sure who the biological father is.
   • 2009, Deborah Gray White, Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, →ISBN:

     “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe” is how the black feminist critic Hortense Spillers describes the reproductive burdens of black women, and her words certainly seem to apply to Sally Hemings's experience.

   • 2010, Eva Nagorski, The Down and Dirty Dish on Revenge, →ISBN:

     As David Buss states in his book The Dangerous Passion, there's an African phrase that captures this male fear: “Mama's baby, papa's maybe.”

   • 2010 November 2, Cameroun Douala, “The Cultural Unity of Black Africa?”, in Real News Network:

     His approach to unity is based on the theses of a Swiss lawyer-macrohistorian, Johan Bachofen, a US anthropologist, Lewis M. Morgan, a German macrohistorian, Friedrich Engels, and deep knowledge of Greek drama. Why the latter? Because it reflects the matriarchy-patriarchy contradiction after the first form recognized by Bachofen, promiscuity. They are all variations on the perennial theme "mama's baby, papa's maybe".

   • 2015 December 25, Valerie Tarico, “Is Jesus' birth worth celebrating? The dark subtext of the nativity scene”, in Salon:

     The enormous value that patriarchal cultures and religions place on female virginity has roots in biology. We’ve all heard the saying, “Mama’s baby, Papa’s maybe.”

   • 2016 December 17, Amy Akon, “Little gifts to girlfriend show how thoughtful you are”, in Poughkeepsie Journal:

     Because men experience "paternity uncertainty" ("Mama's baby, Papa's maybe"), they're more distressed by sexual infidelity, which could chump them into raising a kid who'll pass on some other dude's genes.