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?

WW

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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.

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.

allthegoodnames

I know that technically only a very small minority can't bf even with the right support - but it's taboo for women to say they don't want to.

Personally I wouldn't want another woman to breastfeed my child any more than I would want her to share any other bodily fluids with my child. Not saying that those who do are wrong, just that I wouldn't like it, especially when there's an adequate alternative.

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

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.

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.

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.

I don't think it's helpful to go down the "men invented formula"/"men did this"/"men did that" route.

It's a bit of a red herring, as it was men who were more likely to be in the position to do research in the first place.

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.

allthegood - but what makes you think that? I don't buy into gender essentialism - if anything it's holding women back to think that they'd all would just be sisterly crossfeeders who then happily strap their offspring to their backs to then fulfill their duties in production.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

Vashti - does it discuss then the pressure which is put onto women to breastfeed? I keep pondering whether to pick it up or not, but I think I'd be less inclined if it was only pro-breastfeeding.

It is a very long time since I read it (the late nineties), as I read it when I was breast feeding my my first child. I can't remember it covering that, but I doubt it does because I think that the pressure on women to feel that they should breast feed and the negativity they receive has massively increased over the last 15 years.

A bit or a rambly anecdote, but I remember with my second child, I didn't want to do the skin to skin contact for 15 mins (because I was being stitched up) and midwife was really annoyed because she said I would never be able to establish breast feeding if I didn't have this 15 mins of contact and that it should be compulsory. I knew this was all nonsense because I had breast fed my first child for 18 months so was confident about feeding another child. At the time I thought this was all being said to me because I was a fairly young mum, but now I think it was just the way maternity care was heading, with people being pressured into a whole health culture around breast feeding, which is just making women feel bullied.

So there are now two problems - people who don't like women to breast feed for a variety of reasons and feel the need to keep telling us so, and people who want to bully women over what they consider to be the 'proper' way to feed a child in minute personal detail. And I'm sick of both schools of thought.

I agree with a lot of Starlight's posts here. And it is interesting to think about why women should feel their freedoms are curtailed, when a bf baby is emminently portable. Current society seems to have become very un-childfriendly - why on earth should you not be able to take your baby to the pub, on a walking holiday, to work even. It's just that we seem to frown upon these things rather than thinking about workable solutions.

Mini - my mum BF all 7 of her children, for different lengths of time. The one she BF the longest (2 years) had to have speech therapy, didn't talk properly until he was around 4, has a very receded jawline, and had to have 8 of his milk teeth removed aged 3.

I can't stand that women are pressuring women into doing something they don't want do it/can't do - where's the sisterhood ladies??

Breastfeeding and the issues around it, just cannot be separated from the historical oppression of women IMO. Men created a society where people who bore, fed and nurtured their young, were excluded from that society (and in fact, were not considered people, they were considered women). When historians and people talk about society, they mean men in the main - women were simply not regarded as part of "society" they were confined to the home and the home was separate from society.

All the modern issues around breastfeeding tying women down etc., are totally bound up with the history of our oppression. Breastfeeding and child-care ties us down, because men constructed a society where those activities were excluded from society and we are still fighting to get a real toe-hold in the society which has been so carefully constructed to exclude us.

If the world hadn't been organised with our exclusion at the centre of it, breastfeeding would be irrelevent. If breastfeeding weren't the normal way of feeding human mammals and patriarchy still existed, it would be something else which "tied us down" (as indeed it is: most women in Western society do not breastfeed their young anymore and haven't done for decades or if they do, they curtail it and they're still "tied down". It ain't breastfeeding that's doing that to us, it's the assumption that it doesn't belong in what we call "society". Our subliminal assumptions are still very much based on the idea that stuff men do is "people's business" and belongs in the centre of society (like football etc.) and stuff women do is "women's business" and belongs at the margins of society.

The Politics of Breastfeeding is a political book (the clue is in the title). I wouldn't describe it as a 'pro breastfeeding' book, it is factual book that examines the politics and recent history of infant feeding.

It is critical of both the consumerism and the male dominance that has eroded BF culture.

WW you may not think it is helpful to examine how male actions have eroded BF culture, but lots of other people do. The objective isn't to point the finger and find fault with men or male dominated society - it is just an observation of the facts and an attempt to understand why we are in the position we are today.

I don't think we need to shy away from these things.

And what Basil said.