Breastfeeding and Feminism

[WidowWadman]

Someone mentioned it on the Patriarchy Thread, but I think it deserves a thread of its own.

Breastfeeding is getting a lot of positive coverage with "breast is best" and similar slogans, and I think anything which encourages access to support is great.

At the same time, there's no doubt about it, breastfeeding is tying women down, at least for the initial months, in a way that bottlefeeding doesn't.

Now I've BF'd my first child for 18 months, and have been BFing my second for a year now with no idea how long I'll continue.

Once established, I find it harder to quit than to keep going, even though I seriously wish sometimes she'd just wean herself. I felt the same with No2.

I'm a bit ambivalent about it - I like the fact that it's free, helps to shed weight, and that it means less washing up and sterilising. I'm just really not sure about the ideology thing.

I think women should be getting support if they want it, and that includes access to space for pumping while at work, but I don't like how mothers who choose not to are being made feel guilty. And I'm seriously not sure whether the benefits aren't overstated by the pro-BF lobby.

In a way, a woman who doesn't breastfeed can enjoy freedom much earlier than one who does, so the overzealous promotion of BF (as shown in the endless breast vs bottle arguments), seems sometimes a bit anti-woman to me. It all points into the whole essentialist gender role crap again, doesn't it?

So what is the 'proper' feminist stance, if there is one?

Starlight, in my office you can still bf and go back full time after a year if you have a grandparent to help out, interestingly 2 women in the office have their MIL/mother helping them full time and they have come over from India to do so.

Our loss of community and familial ties works against as well.

eclectic what is your take on feminism? It is as simple as 'don't let yourself be oppressed'? (genuine question - not being facaetious). And what action would you suggest? And what (if any) forces do you acknowledge as being anti-feminist?

sorry - should have said 'is it' not 'it is.' Not wishing to tell anyone what their take is on anything.

In the uk, for most women, yes it think it's about not letting yourself be repressed and breaking the mould. In other cultures, there needs to be much more education and feminist action. To think we are discussing bf as something that ties you down makes me sad. Women in other cultures are being forced to marry, being raped and killed for no reason as part of society without justice.

Sorry Eclectic, not to have responded to your post; I was offline.

Likelihood of death in childbirth varies by country, even in developed countries, so it isn't just down to biology. It is a feminist issue to make sure that women get appropriate healthcare when they are pregnant.

www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/12/maternal-mortality-rates-millennium-development-goals

Given that we live in a highly gendered world, to me everything is a feminist issue as that will involve considering how gender constructs any particular issue.

But it is also important to remember than there are feminism is not, not ever has been a unified body of thought. So there is rarely a singular feminist stance on anything

"To think we are discussing bf as something that ties you down makes me sad. Women in other cultures are being forced to marry, being raped and killed for no reason as part of society without justice."

So because other women are undoubtedly worse off, I shouldn't explore or even complain about things that affect me personally? That's unuseful whataboutery.

Me just accepting breastfeeding as a biological imperative with all the negative consequences it has for me, won't lead to less rapes or forced marriages. Is it not possible to care about more than one thing?

Lets agree to disagree. Bf is beneficial for children. Only women can bf. get over it.

Yeah, get over it, and back to the kitchen. It's only natural. FFS.

WW, yes you're right, it is natural :)

Wasn't formula invented as a way of exploiting the worries and fears of new mothers by telling them they didn't have enough milk and advertising formula as better than breastmilk for financial gain by men?
If that's not anti feminist I don't know what is.

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.

eclectic - your reaction is exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote the OP.

The "natural"-stick is used to beat women about the head with, as the fallacy of "natural = superior" is refusing to go away.

Dying of infectious diseases is natural after all, too, and nobody in their right mind would say that that's better than treating and surviving them.

NB, I'm not saying that breastfeeding is a bad thing. It's a valid choice (and I am doing it myself). I'm not saying there shouldn't be support for BF, and women shouldn't be enabled to do it wherever they want without having to defend themselves.

My beef is with the suggestion that women must do it, "because it's natural".

allthegood - this sounds more like propaganda than factual reporting to me - what is the evidence base, that it was men who wanted to take breastfeeding away from women for financial gain, rather than people looking for a solution to babies dying of malnutrition?

Was the sisterhood support big enough with enough spare milk to bring all those babies through?

WW, this is a ff v bf debate dressed up as feminism. I'm out.

What is it that makes you so uncomfortable, eclectic?

What makes me so uncomfortable is the constant blaming everything in life on patriachy and not taking any responsibility for your own actions... Even down to bf. also, the complete denial of scientific research. This board is full of opinion being spouted without any reall back up. It amazes me and quite frankly I understand why most is mn do not even give this board the time of day, which is a shame as I'm there are lots of women who are interested in equality. It's a waste of space board and it really needs to change to do anything positive otherwise it's just a clique agreeing with ideology that has no impact on other women's lives.

I was just thinking about my own experience of breastfeeding and my motivations to do it in the first place.

If I'm honest my decision to breastfeed DC1 was as much to do with the health benefits for him as my desire to escape the pregnant teenager stereotype. I felt I was already being judged as stupid and irresponsible, especially by the medical profession, and breastfeeding was a way to counter that. For me it said 'I am intelligent and informed enough to make the best possible decision for my baby and I am mature enough not to have any hang-ups about my body.' I still found it very difficult getting started and after cracked nipples and mastitis and the baby losing weight, I pretty much considered myself a failure, not what a young inexperienced mum needs.

To a lesser extent you see this in middle-class circles as breastfeeding is very closely linked to education and class. The health benefits for a long time seemed so irrefutable that bottle-feeding, certainly from birth, was seen as something only less intelligent or informed mothers would do. You can be made to feel like you have committed actual child neglect in some groups, if you admit to bottle-feeding. This level of pressure is not about feminism and restoring value to something previously underrated - it's competitive parenting and does women no favours because it actually reduces our choices.

I have to say the arrival of twins freed me from some of this expectation, and I just fed them myself for the first few weeks. It was a relief to have a legitimate reason not to continue longterm.

My last child I fed until she was 3 mainly because she was so easy, and once I got going it was more difficult to stop. However towards the end I felt really hemmed in by it, and to some extent it delayed the bond developing with her father, she was very much 'mummy mummy' and I felt a bit suffocated.

So where does that leave us in terms of feminism and infant feeding? If the old adage is true, 'the most important part of infant feeding is feeding the infant' then in terms of feminism it should be about what is best for the mother and breast, in that respect, is not always best.

Erm, I haven't blamed anything on the patriarchy, but just tried exploring the question of breastfeeding and choice and how it affects equality.

You seemed to take huge offence at the suggestion that such a thing as choice should be taken into consideration, when breastfeeding is just "natural".

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.

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.

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...

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.

it's not breastfeeding's fault.

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.