Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America

299 Pages·2015·1.512 MB·English

by  Jessica Martucci

Back to the Breast

Back to the Breast
Natural Motherhood and
Breastfeeding in America
jessica l. martucci
the university of chicago press chicago and london
jessica l. martucci is a fellow in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy,
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2015 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2015.
Printed in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 28803- 1 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 28817- 8 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226288178.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Martucci, Jessica L., author.
Back to the breast : natural motherhood and breastfeeding in America / Jessica L.
Martucci.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-226-28803-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-28817-8 (ebook)
1. Breastfeeding—United States—History—20th century. 2. Breastfeeding
promotion—United States—History—20th century. 3. Infants—Nutrition—United
States. 4. Motherhood—United States. 5. Maternal and infant welfare—United
States—History—20th century. 6. Mothers—United States—Social life and customs—
20th century. I. Title.
rj216.m36 2015
649′.33—dc23
2015004416
Portions of the introduction and chapter 3 fi rst appeared in Journal of Women’s His-
tory, © The Johns Hopkins University Press. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared in
Jessica Martucci, “Maternal Expectations: New Mothers, Nurses, and Breastfeeding,”
Nursing History Review 20 (2012): 72–192. Springer Publishing Company, LLC.
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Introduction: Why Breastfeeding? 1
chapter 1. Make Room for Mother: The “Psy”- entifi c Ideology of
Natural Motherhood 27
chapter 2. Frustration and Failure: The Scientifi c Management of
Breastfeeding 58
chapter 3. “Motherhood Raised to the nth Degree”: Breastfeeding
in the Postwar Years 89
chapter 4. Maternal Expectations: New Mothers, Nurses, and
Breastfeeding 113
chapter 5. Our Bodies, Our Nature: Breastfeeding, the
Environment, and Feminism 140
chapter 6. Woman’s Right, Mother’s Milk: The Nature and
Technology of Breast Milk Feeding 177
epilogue. Natural Motherhood Redux 213
Acknowledgments 229
Notes 233
Index 285

Introduction
Why Breastfeeding?
In 1956, Martha, a mother of four and advocate for maternal health
in Cleveland, Ohio, wrote to the Maternity Center Association head-
quartered in New York City. Her letter addressed an issue that had long
been on her mind: breastfeeding. In the 1940s and 1950s, Martha be-
longed to a shrinking cohort of American mothers who breastfed their
infants for any length of time. As a member of the Association for Par-
ent Education group in her area she knew of a wide range of information
and resources on natural childbirth and breastfeeding. Unable to avoid
the “black out” anesthetic options imposed on her during the labors and
deliveries of her fi rst two children in the hospital, she was all the more
happy when she was able to counteract these unwanted interventions by
successfully breastfeeding all four of her children. She fondly reminisced
in her letter that she had “weaned our last baby just one week before her
fi rst birthday and enjoyed nursing her even more than our fi rst three.”
Despite her own personal breastfeeding triumphs, she lamented what
she believed was the growing need for a network of maternal advocates
who might support mothers who nursed. “For breast feeding there is no
product, thus no sponsor,” she observed, and yet she knew many moth-
ers who wanted to breastfeed. “I have help [sic] 15 mothers myself . . .
but feel that a larger group organized for this purpose would be more ef-
fective to a larger group of women.”1 Little did Martha know at the time
that a handful of like-m inded mothers in Franklin Park, Illinois, were
already in the process of organizing just such a group. Martha’s interest
in breastfeeding eventually led her to discover La Leche League’s exis-
tence and she went on to found the nation’s second League chapter.
2 Introduction
The history of infant feeding has long held an important place in
the interdisciplinary body of scholarship devoted to gender, sexual-
ity, women’s studies, and the history of medicine.2 Martha’s story, how-
ever, hints at an important narrative thread in the history of breastfeed-
ing that has remained underexplored: the persistence of breastfeeding
throughout the age of the bottle and its impact on infant feeding trends,
practices, and policies later in the century. How do we make sense of
mothers like Martha who remained dedicated to breastfeeding through-
out this period? In the 1950s, bottle-f eeding, not breastfeeding, was
widely supported by medical advice as well as the normative ideals of
motherhood, science, and consumerism that characterized the post-
war era.3 Yet Martha was not alone in her devotion to breastfeeding in
this period, a fact evidenced by the breastfeeding angst in the popular
press and the success of women’s health education networks, of which
La Leche League was only one part. Women like Martha cultivated, ma-
nipulated, and spread knowledge about breastfeeding among themselves
while relying on a small but prolifi c group of midcentury doctors, nurses,
and social and biological scientists. Together, they created a body of ex-
pert knowledge about motherhood, lactation, and child rearing that pro-
vided legitimacy and validation for their perspective.
That the early roots of the breastfeeding movement can be found only
in low- profi le subcultures within American science and culture at the
time should not lead us to automatically dismiss the importance of these
seemingly trivial beginnings. If anything, the persistence of breastfeed-
ing as a practice and a body of knowledge during the decades of bottle-
feeding’s vast popularity demands closer attention and analysis in or-
der to better contextualize the story of breastfeeding’s sharp rise in the
last quarter of the twentieth century. That breastfeeding knowledge sur-
vived, and arguably thrived, throughout small pockets of American sci-
ence and culture during the middle third of the last century is a reality
that has not yet been adequately addressed by the existing historiog-
raphy.4 In this book, I trace the emergence, rise, and fraught continua-
tion of breastfeeding in the twentieth century into the twenty- fi rst. What
can we learn about motherhood throughout this period from examin-
ing the growth of a breastfeeding movement in the mid-t wentieth cen-
tury? What historical insights can we gain through an analysis of the
uniquely modern connection between breastfeeding and motherhood
that emerged in those decades? How does focusing on a story of breast-
feeding’s persistence change our understanding of its history? Who were
Why Breastfeeding? 3
the people involved in reframing breastfeeding and why did it hold value
for them? How did changing ideas about science, nature, and mother-
hood infl uence what breastfeeding meant in the postwar period and how
do the ideological roots of its renewal continue to shape the practices,
meanings, discourse, and policies surrounding breastfeeding today?
In pursuing these questions, this book explores the circumstances,
ideas, actions, and legacies of the mid- to late twentieth- century moth-
ers, scientists, and clinicians, who advocated, wrote about, studied, and
practiced breastfeeding. The history behind breastfeeding’s return re-
veals an important intersection between the experiential knowledge of
mothers and the scientifi c expertise of professionals in the medical and
human sciences. My focus in this project is on the ideas, practices, and
processes surrounding breastfeeding. I do not engage substantively with
narratives in the history of formula feeding, the baby- food industry, or
the activism surrounding these issues (i.e., the Nestlé boycott). By con-
centrating explicitly on breastfeeding, this account provides readers with
a more complex and nuanced perspective of the story behind the statis-
tical rise in breastfeeding that began in the 1970s and offers a deeper
historical context for contemporary breastfeeding discourse. Mothers
and experts alike made breastfeeding matter in new ways in the mid-
twentieth century by constructing an alternative ideological framework
that I refer to as natural motherhood, one that relied overtly on a scien-
tifi cally validated understanding of breastfeeding as an inherently “nat-
ural,” “pure,” and evolutionarily perfected and embodied process.5 This
ideology, which I discuss at length in the pages ahead, began to come to-
gether in the interwar years, but it did not completely coalesce until the
postwar decades when it met with the era’s pronatalism within the cruci-
ble of the Cold War family.6
The period encompassing World War II and the postwar years gave
rise to a unique construction of breastfeeding within a new understand-
ing of nature, one built around a science of instinct, evolutionary prin-
ciples, and an evolving consciousness of the relationship between the
natural world and that of humans, particularly women. This ideological
underpinning helped breathe new life into breastfeeding by the 1950s, a
phenomenon best illustrated in many ways by the founding of the breast-
feeding support organization La Leche League in 1956, which continues
to operate to this day as an international organization. Interest in breast-
feeding slowly gathered momentum throughout much of the next two
decades as it intersected with the burgeoning environmental and femi-