Breastfeeding and Feminism

Mini, I think it is basically a case that you are damned if you do and damned if you don't, because it involves women's choices about their bodies and work (feeding people).

Women who formula feed are made to feel bad, and women who breast feed are made to feel bad. Both receive negative treatment in different ways.

So while the politics of breast feeding is a feminist book that looks at issues around breast feeding, it doesn't look at the negative experiences that women who formula feed experience. That is rather like a book on the experiences of lesbians in a patriarchal society will not look in great detail at the experiences of heterosexual women in a patriarchal society.

I worry on these threads (this is not aimed at you) that by discussing our experiences of one kind of feeding and the often negative context we do that in, that we end up making each other feel judged. And I wish that wasn't the case.

Basil, I had a quick look at the link to the book "politics of breast feeding", is it all pro BF or is it unbiased.

I was cross examined many times with both DS1 &2 about my decision to FF. One midwife tried to tell me I would do untold harm to my child's development, all of which proved to be unfounded. I question not the fact that it is optimal to BF (its is natural, that word again) but that women are under a huge amount of pressure to conform and the research may actually be flawed.

Speech is a good place to start, apparently bottle fed babies have delayed speech compared to BF babies. It is assumed to be breast feeding that makes the difference. No one has sought to question this. I think it would be fair to say that only recently has research started in this field, more middle class higher achieving women BF than working class women, single mothers, very young mothers etc,, but I would guess that the same women that BF had all the benefits of an optimal childhood themselves, they speak to their children, sing to them, read to them because they model their behaviour on their mother/role model and it is this factor that benefits speech development not Bf.

I think the benefits are being over stated but I don't know why, except that in an age where more women compete economically with men, maybe this is just one issue specific to women that can be overstated in order to remind women of their lower economic status/capacity.

Himalaya I agree with the sentiment that women should get support with breastfeeding - but I do not think that women should be made to feel guilty for choosing not to.

In some areas in the UK, health advisers are not even allowed to give advice on FF, unless the mother has specifically said that she does not want to BF. In my opinion that is wrong. My own health visitor has made me feel extremely guilty for doing mixed feeding , and if I wasn't the person I am, I would probably still be forcing myself to BF at every feeding, even though it's causing me a lot of distress.

Choices about BF certainly makes it a feminist issue - surely being a feminist is being able to make your choice about your body and how you use it, without any one making you feel guilty or less of a woman?

Yay tis an interesting topic - just dropping this in here:

www.fearlessformulafeeder.com/2011/10/youve-not-come-long-way-baby-why.html

Allthegoodnamesweretaken

If you look at the Mellins Baby Food ads they say infant milk "for when fresh cow's milk is disagreeable or not available"

www.sensationpress.com/mellinsbabyfood.htm

I just don't think it is accurate to imagine a halcyon age where women were happily cross feeding and infant mortality was nothing to fear. And then the formula companies came along wipping up unfounded fears and exploited them.

If many babies were being fed milk and other stuff then developing a product which is better and safer seems like a good idea.

None of this means that formula companies and advertising shouldn't be regulated, and their motives viewed in a commercial light, but I do think moral tales of blissful sisterhood vs greedy male capitalists is not accurate.

It is absolutely a feminist issue, there is so much politics around breastfeeding and having to venture out onto the bf/ff battlefield is something I dread about becoming a mother.

Women are consumed with guilt around this issue. What particularly strikes me about bf/ff threads is how many bf mothers are apparently drawing on nothing but negative emotions to motivate them to keep going, and how eager they are to commend the same approach to other women. We are obviously primed and ready to receive this message; I've witnessed close friends suffer crippling emotional turmoil and guilt while struggling to bf their babies, and they still carry it with them, even now their babies are long since weaned.

It seems to me that all this horrible guilt tripping is a cheap and covenient way to get women to bf - and may their emotional wellbeing, self esteem and relationships with other mothers be damned. Hell you can even get women to do the guilt tripping to each other - and if mothers internalise sufficient guilt, then we don't need better postnatal bf support, or a better work/life balance, or clean and comfortable places to bf in public places, or increased awareness.

TBH anyone who doesn't understand why breastfeeding might be a feminist issue, hasn't done the reading. The politics of breastfeeding is a good start.

But that assumes that had women been in the position, that they would have done the same, and I don't think they would have.

Completely agree with it being taboo, I think it's sad that women are made to feel bad for the choices they make. i hate to see women shamed for ff as I do seeing them shamed for bf.

I personally would rather my sister/close friend fed my child than give formula, but I think I am probably in the minority. But my point is that if men hadn't invented formula and advertised it as better than breastmilk, and male doctors hadn't advocated ff then attitudes towards breastfeeding and cross feeding would be completely different.

There is a really interesting bit in 'The Politics of Breastfeeding' describing how formula companies got involved in the funding and designing of maternity wards. This was where the idea of separating mothers from their babies came from - 'modern' maternity wards were built with babies together in nurseries and mothers together in wards so that the mothers could 'rest'.

Of course it is much harder to establish feeding when your baby has been taken away from you and only brought to you at specific times (as specified by male doctors who thought babies needed routine). Especially when the staff are being encouraged to bottle feed your baby.

The culture of breastfeeding was irrevocably damaged and we have never really go it back.

This is one of the many reasons why BF is a feminist issue.

Probably am himalaya, but it doesn't change the fact that some women fed another's child because they wanted to help, or that formula companies exploited women's insecurities over feeding to make money.
Looking further back than the industrial revolution to when people would have lived in smaller communities with stronger family links, it would not have been unusual for a woman's sister to feed her children if she was unable to. This is common in a lot of mammals, in fact my guinia pigs cross fed.

Well I shall seem very radical then for choosing not to.

Allthegoodnamesweretaken

"Prior to formula, if a woman couldn't breastfeed she relied on other women to support her and nourish her baby, that's a wonderful example of sisterhood IMO and has been taken away from us, it's now seen as weird and unnatural because of ff."

I think you are looking at this through rose tinted glasses. There was some reciprocal feeding, but mainly people partially weaned earlier onto milk, sugar, water mixes, tea, pap, bread and milk mashed up etc.... Richer people employed wet nurses, for money not sisterhood.

WW

c590298.r98.cf2.rackcdn.com/TFO1_347.JPG

Advertisment stating that their formula milk is the best food for infants. They also played on the fact that people viewed a healthy baby as a chunky one, so displayed pictures of chunky, robust babies as 'a melin's food baby'.

The ammount of women who actually cannot physically breastfeed is very small, and since women are able to tandem feed or feed triplets, it is reasonable to assume that it would be possible for the few babies whose mothers are unable to bf to be fed by other lactating women.

Widowwadman -

It's a good question. I do think it's a feminist issue, and I also feel ambivalent about it, as I don't think there is a good feminist 'answer' (and I don't have a good homemade answer either).

Fwiw I breastfed for 7 years (two children), and I did (and still do) think it was a magical, amazing wonderful thing to do. But at the same time I recognise that I am hugely lucky that this wasn't a career ending move (because I work from home, and so does my DH, and I am more ambitious than him).

I don't find any of the standard feminist answers satisfying - they start with who the "bad guys" must be - e.g. workplaces, formula companies and fathers etc... and construct a story around that. But, like you I am at the notion that society took a wrong turn when it found better ways of surviving than hand-working fields with a baby on your back and children working beside you.

The other problem with the bad guys stories is that they seem to show that "the patriarchy" is in disarray - it can't decide whether to keep women down by inventing a product which is almost as good as breastmilk and untying women from this responsibility, pressuring them to breastfeed or pressuring them not to breastfeed.

I think that everything should be done to support women to breastfeed (e.g. Getting started, right to BF in public, reasonable accommodations at work) and to build economic "on- ramps" so that a couple of years of work disrupted by BF sets back their career by a couple of years but doesn't scupper it completely.

At the same time I don't think any of these measures will remove the dilemmas and ambivalence around BF choices.

it's not breastfeeding's fault.

Oh thank you WidowWadman for starting this thread. I have been thinking about this for a long time and I am going to have read through the thread now.

EclecticShock, I hate dogs. Can't bear them; don't understand why anyone would want to own such a creature, or even have one near them.

For this reason I tend not to post in The Doghouse. Although I could pop across and tell them all how utterly wrong and stupid they are for having anything to do with dogs, I suppose...

Babies dying of malnutrition? Really???

I have no doubt that in some cases formula has saved lives, eg babies with galactosaemia, prem babies whose mother's could not produce enough ebm and has given mothers who for very valid reasons found bf not the choice for them but I doubt that it saved many lives compared with the overall negative impact on the health of women and children worldwide.

Goodness, ES, most of the people on this thread I don't recognise as regular posters on the feminist board. Presumably they've come on here to talk about breast feeding or bottle feeding because it is important to them.

Clearly discrimination against breast feeding is an issue, or the government wouldn't have bothered to put in place various laws to prevent it.