"Um, I think Nestle's aggressive marketing might have slightly more to do with it than Tiny Tear's bottle, to be fair@Leonie."
Maybe, maybe not. These things are hard to quantify. I certainly think that encouraging children to role play bottlefeeding, and to assume that bottles are essential accessories for babies is unhelpful to them seeing breastfeeding as the normal way to feed babies in later life, particularly when they are brought up in a society where breastfeeding is more or less invisible in real life and in the media, unless their own mothers are breastfeeding younger children at home
"The complete change in women's role in society over the last century must surely have affected bf-ing rates, too, no?"
Women have always had to work. And in the UK today the women who are least likely to breastfeed are also those who are least likely to go back to work, or to EVER have worked. The women most likely to go back to work are also most likely to continue breastfeeding, and to breastfeed for longest.
"I know loads of women who breastfed happily until they went back to work and then couldn't be doing with the faff of expressing, so switched to formula."
Most women go back to work when their babies are 6 months +. By this time only a very small minority of babies are still being breastfed anyway.
""They weren't ignorant / evil SMA-lovers. They were working women with a range of priorities, is all."
Nobody here has called ff 'evil'.