The feminist politics of breastfeeding

Australian Feminist Studies

Volumn 19, Issue 45, 2004, Pages 273-285

  Hausman, Bernice L ^a  

^a VIRGINIA POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE AND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 8744255786     PISSN: 08164649     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0816464042000278963     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. The Sydney conference occurred one day after the International Lactation Consultant's Association Conference at the Sydney Convention Centre. This was the first time the annual ILCA conference was held outside North America.
2. At the Barnard conference, this situation was consistently referred to as a 'perfect storm' moment, alluding to the confluence of factors making it both an opportunity and something of a crisis. While I'm not certain that the 'perfect storm' allusion is appropriate, given its reference to the male homosocial world of the fishing ship and the trials of masculinity experienced by George Clooney and his crew, it seems accurate to say that something is brewing about motherhood in America. See Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: a True Story of Men Against the Sea (W.W. Norton) New York, 1997; Wolfgang Peterson (Dir.) The Perfect Storm, Warner Brothers, 2000. The film starred George Clooney in the lead role as captain of the doomed ship.
3. At the Barnard conference, this situation was consistently referred to as a 'perfect storm' moment, alluding to the confluence of factors making it both an opportunity and something of a crisis. While I'm not certain that the 'perfect storm' allusion is appropriate, given its reference to the male homosocial world of the fishing ship and the trials of masculinity experienced by George Clooney and his crew, it seems accurate to say that something is brewing about motherhood in America. See Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: a True Story of Men Against the Sea (W.W. Norton) New York, 1997; Wolfgang Peterson (Dir.) The Perfect Storm, Warner Brothers, 2000. The film starred George Clooney in the lead role as captain of the doomed ship.
4. See Lauri Umansky, Motherhood Reconceived: Feminism and the Legacies of the Sixties (New York University Press) New York, 1996, for a discussion of earlier second-wave attention to motherhood.
5. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (Henry Holt/Metropolitan) New York, 2001; Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford) New York, 2000; Barbara Pocock, The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do About It (Federation Press) Sydney, 2003; Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn't (New Press) New York, 1999.
6. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (Henry Holt/Metropolitan) New York, 2001; Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford) New York, 2000; Barbara Pocock, The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do About It (Federation Press) Sydney, 2003; Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn't (New Press) New York, 1999.
7. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (Henry Holt/Metropolitan) New York, 2001; Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford) New York, 2000; Barbara Pocock, The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do About It (Federation Press) Sydney, 2003; Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn't (New Press) New York, 1999.
8. Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued (Henry Holt/Metropolitan) New York, 2001; Joan Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford) New York, 2000; Barbara Pocock, The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do About It (Federation Press) Sydney, 2003; Susan Maushart, The Mask of Motherhood: How Becoming a Mother Changes Everything and Why We Pretend It Doesn't (New Press) New York, 1999.
9. Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Beacon) Boston, 1989, is the classic text in this genre.
10. See Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1996.
11. Bernice L. Hausman, Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture (Routledge) New York, 2003.
12. 'Pregnancy, birth, and lactation are different in kind from other maternal work and, measured by the life of one child, are brief episodes in years of mothering. A scrambling temperamental toddler in reach of poisons under the sink, a schoolchild left out of a birthday party, a college student unable to write her papers-these children are more emblematic of the demands on a mother than is a feeding infant, let alone a silent fetus' (Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, p. 48). Later in Maternal Thinking, when she has gone through a discussion of birthing with the acknowledgement that 'my treatment of birthing labour has been entirely consistent with at least the more benign versions of philosophical suspicion and denial of female bodies' (p. 193), she still believes 'that mothering is a focused work that can be undertaken by men as well as women' even though she has 'noticed the minimization of birthing labour that my concepts reveal' (p. 197).
13. Obviously, not all mothers are embodied in precisely the ways that breastfeeding mothers are embodied. Adoptive mothers and lesbian partners of biological mothers are two kinds of mothers who are not themselves embodied in precisely the same ways that birth mothers are. And, clearly, mothers who feed their infants something other than their own breastmilk through nursing are embodied differently from breastfeeding mothers. I am using breastfeeding here as a way to think through what motherhood means when we insist that mothers are women, when we take account of the specificity of women's embodied reproductive burden. That all women do not precisely share these experiences does not mean that it isn't valuable to think through the issues for the majority of women who do. The risk here is not that we assume an equivalence between women and mothers; rather, the risk is that we can't articulate why it is that women's bodies as mothers are excluded from the public sphere.
14. See 〈www.eeoc.gov/35th/thelaw/pregnancy_discrimination-1978. html〉 and 〈http://www.eeoc. gov/facts/fs-preg.html〉 for the act and its interpretation.
15. Pocock, The Work/Life Collision, p. 223.
16. Hausman, Mother's Milk. See also Rima Apple, Mothers and Medicine: a Social History of Infant Feeding 1890-1950 (University of Wisconsin Press) Madison, Wisconsin, 1987; Adrienne Berney, 'Reforming the Maternal Breast: Infant Feeding and American Culture, 1870-1940', dissertation, University of Delaware, 1998; and Jacqueline Wolf, Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Ohio State University Press) Columbus, 2001.
17. Hausman, Mother's Milk. See also Rima Apple, Mothers and Medicine: a Social History of Infant Feeding 1890-1950 (University of Wisconsin Press) Madison, Wisconsin, 1987; Adrienne Berney, 'Reforming the Maternal Breast: Infant Feeding and American Culture, 1870-1940', dissertation, University of Delaware, 1998; and Jacqueline Wolf, Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Ohio State University Press) Columbus, 2001.
18. Hausman, Mother's Milk. See also Rima Apple, Mothers and Medicine: a Social History of Infant Feeding 1890-1950 (University of Wisconsin Press) Madison, Wisconsin, 1987; Adrienne Berney, 'Reforming the Maternal Breast: Infant Feeding and American Culture, 1870-1940', dissertation, University of Delaware, 1998; and Jacqueline Wolf, Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Ohio State University Press) Columbus, 2001.
19. Hausman, Mother's Milk. See also Rima Apple, Mothers and Medicine: a Social History of Infant Feeding 1890-1950 (University of Wisconsin Press) Madison, Wisconsin, 1987; Adrienne Berney, 'Reforming the Maternal Breast: Infant Feeding and American Culture, 1870-1940', dissertation, University of Delaware, 1998; and Jacqueline Wolf, Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Ohio State University Press) Columbus, 2001.
20. In March 2002 Alice Dreger gave a talk about conjoined twins that began with a description of a mother-infant breastfeeding dyad, as a way of suggesting a model for normalising conjoinment by assimilation to other embodied states. However, if what distinguishes conjoinment is the linkage of two subjects who are, in common understanding, supposed to be separate, the opposite is true of the breastfeeding couple: they are two separate subjects, one of whom is dependent on the other physiologically. They are separate but must be together as well.
21. See Rhonda Shaw, 'Theorizing Breastfeeding: Body Ethics, Maternal Generosity and the Gift Relation', Body & Society, vol. 9, no. 2, 2003, pp. 55-73, for a discussion of breastfeeding as an ethical relation.
22. Recent problems for a female MP in Australia who breastfed while parliament was in session is a case in point.
23. Pocock, The Work/Life Collision, p. 226.
24. Penny Van Esterik, Beyond the Breast Bottle Controvery (Rutgers University Press) New Brunswick, 1989, p. 211.
25. Linda Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon) Boston, 1995; Pam Carter, Feminism, Breasts and Breastfeeding (St. Martin's) New York, 1995; Jules Law, 'The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labour', Signs, vol. 25, no. 2, 2000, pp. 407-50.
26. Linda Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon) Boston, 1995; Pam Carter, Feminism, Breasts and Breastfeeding (St. Martin's) New York, 1995; Jules Law, 'The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labour', Signs, vol. 25, no. 2, 2000, pp. 407-50.
27. Linda Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon) Boston, 1995; Pam Carter, Feminism, Breasts and Breastfeeding (St. Martin's) New York, 1995; Jules Law, 'The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labour', Signs, vol. 25, no. 2, 2000, pp. 407-50.
28. See Hausman, Mother's Milk, pp. 196-207.
29. International Women Count Network and the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action Women and Work Task Force, The Milk of Human Kindness: a Global Factsheet on the Economic Value of Breastfeeding (Crossroads) London, 2000.
30. The Milk of Human Kindness, p. 15; emphasis added.
31. The Milk of Human Kindness, p. 16.
32. Katherine Dettwyler, 'Beauty and the Breast: the Cultural Context of Breastfeeding in the United States' in Patricia Stuart-Macadam and Katherine Dettwyler (eds), Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives (Aldine de Gruyter) New York, 1995, p. 187.
33. Some people might object that the emphasis on women's labour in mothering borrows the value of work from the public world defined by male norms. I take that criticism, but I have not found another word that adequately conveys the kind of activity I understand mothering to involve. In addition, when mothering is not considered labour, it is too easy to sentimentalise it as simply a gift, an idealised form of loving. That, it seems to me, belittles women's commitment to the practices of motherhood, and also prejudges women whose relation to their mothering is more matter of fact. In my work I am coming to see mothering as both labour and gift, especially as I analyse it through breastfeeding as a physiological relation; in this scenario, I see both labour and gift as schemas that work against the normalising and sentimentalising tendencies of each term.
34. R.W. Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford University Press) Stanford, 1987, p. 62.
35. See, for example, Carolyn Pearce, 'The Isolation of a New Mother-and its Lasting Effects', NMAA Newsletter, vol. 12, no. 3, April 1976, pp. 1-6, Box 22, ABA Archive, Victorian State Library, BC MO5122. Shirley Ambrose, President of NMAA during the later 1970s, wrote: 'We need feeding and changing rooms at shopping and sports complexes; we need the community to so recognize the importance of breast feeding that ... employers take this into account. Build on it, make a provision for it, support it, so that a nursing mother may equally, with her bottle feeding counterpart, lead a full, involved life in her community.' Shirley Ambrose, President's Message, NAM Newsletter, vol. 14, no. 3, April 1978, p. 4, Box 22, ABA Archive, Victorian State Library, BC MO5122.
36. See, for example, Carolyn Pearce, 'The Isolation of a New Mother-and its Lasting Effects', NMAA Newsletter, vol. 12, no. 3, April 1976, pp. 1-6, Box 22, ABA Archive, Victorian State Library, BC MO5122. Shirley Ambrose, President of NMAA during the later 1970s, wrote: 'We need feeding and changing rooms at shopping and sports complexes; we need the community to so recognize the importance of breast feeding that ... employers take this into account. Build on it, make a provision for it, support it, so that a nursing mother may equally, with her bottle feeding counterpart, lead a full, involved life in her community.' Shirley Ambrose, President's Message, NAM Newsletter, vol. 14, no. 3, April 1978, p. 4, Box 22, ABA Archive, Victorian State Library, BC MO5122.
37. See Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (Yale University Press) New Haven, 1996.
38. There are, of course, many reasons why breastfeeding is abandoned early or never taken up, in both developed and developing countries, and among poor and better resourced women. See Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping: the Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1992, as an example of an impoverished context where the rate of maternal nursing is very low and is associated with a high rate of infant mortality.
39. Eben H. Hipsley, 'Failed (or Abandoned) Lactation in Australia', NMAA Newsletter, January-February 1969, pp. 6-7.
40. It seems important to note here the significance of a two-sex model of the body for sustaining maternalist paradigms for domestic motherhood. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: the Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press) Cambridge, MA, 1990, argues that the model for sexual difference as sexual dimorphism, the idea that male and female bodies are both complementary and opposite, as well as being absolutely and completely different from each other, was produced at the end of the eighteenth century as a way of grounding the male domination of the social world in the supposedly stable foundation of nature and natural difference. Women were not only natural, but nature was located in the domestic realm, and men, women's opposite, took up their cultural positions in the public realm of commerce. Thus, the traditional maternalist call for women's difference and strength in the domestic realm is grounded in a belief in the unique opposition of male and female, the notion that sex defines a tremendous and complete difference between men's and women's bodies (and thus social capacities). It is no wonder that equality feminists have sought to downplay difference and promote assimilation to male norms. Yet to deny all physical difference, especially those that continue to define women's exclusion from public life, is equally problematic. The lesson here is that the social world, and its exclusions, must be addressed directly, as Laqueur points out that the belief in two incommensurable sexes is a social requirement, not a biological one.
41. Personal communications, Beth Aiken and Marcia Jarmel.
42. Exclusive breastfeeding for six months seems to offer a similar transmission rate from HIV-positive mothers to infants as formula feeding. In certain impoverished contexts, the risk of HIV transmission is more than equalled by the risk of gastrointestinal illness in infants not breastfed; more children are likely to die from the latter if not breastfed than become infected by HIV if they are. Thus, appropriate infant feeding is a complex practice when one lives in a context in which multiple pathogens are likely to infect children.
43. Linda Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon) Boston, 1999.
44. This point was marvellously made by Jean Bethke Elshtain at the Barnard conference, during a question and answer period.
45. Kerreen Reiger, Our Bodies, Our Babies: the Forgotten Women's Movement (Melbourne University Press) Melbourne, 2001.