Back to the Breast

Expectant women and new mothers are more than familiar with the phrase “breast is best.” Despite American society's seeming unwillingness to create spaces and policies that enable breastfeeding, mothers face widespread pressure to breastfeed their infants with an intense hostility if they “fail” to do so. In Back to the Breast Jessica Martucci identifies the ideological roots of contemporary breastfeeding rhetoric and practice. Scholars of motherhood have demonstrated that twentieth-century American women received messages about breastfeeding that ranged from contradictory to wholly negative. Far fewer mothers breastfed their infants for any length of time in that century than did so in previous generations. Nevertheless, Martucci draws our attention to “the persistence of breastfeeding throughout the age of the bottle,” placing particular emphasis on the role mothers—whether as scientists, anthropologists, or stay-at-home caregivers—played in advocating for breastfeeding (p. 2). Natural motherhood, rooted in scientific and psychological studies and women's experiential knowledge, emerged as an alternative ideological framework that challenged much of the mid-twentieth century's reliance on medical models and consumerism to shape infant feeding practices. This, then, is the story of a counterideology that sought to validate and empower women's experiences as mothers. The origins of La Leche League, attachment theory in parenting, lactation consultants, and advances in breast pump technologies are all important threads in this story

Breast feeding · Breastfeeding · Consumerism · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Sociology · American Literature and Culture · Breastfeeding Practices and Influences · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Medicine · Psychology · Pediatrics