The Big Letdown

by Kimberly Seals Allers

  Are these small perks supposed to compensate for the fact that we don’t get to be with our babies? Studies show U.S. women still work more hours per week than in any other industrialized country. Many corporate cultures still value time at the office and at the bar after work over actual productivity—a trend that undermines the work of mothering. And making it easier to pump milk or get it home doesn’t necessarily help me get home.

  Having more time off would actually allow moms to properly establish their breastfeeding routine and extend the time of breastfeeding at the breast before transitioning to pumping. When mothers are returning to work two to three weeks after childbirth, many don’t bother to start breastfeeding and others stop so soon because the barriers seem insurmountable.

  Meanwhile, turning into a pump nation could reduce some of the health benefits of breastfeeding. Milk that is directly obtained from the breast is better because bottle feeding reduces the effectiveness of antibodies and kills living cells found in breast milk, experts say. Also, pumped milk doesn’t have the same fat consistency as milk received directly from the breast and some of the precious fat is lost in the pump parts, said Dr. Miriam Labbok, the former professor at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health as well as former director of the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute. “An increased reliance on pumping, especially early in the breastfeeding relationship, will certainly blunt some of the benefits of breastfeeding,” says Labbok.

  Ultimately, the breast pump is a fitting metaphor for women’s ongoing struggle with breastfeeding: Too many parts that need to be cleaned. Outdated systems. No dignity. And too much noise. In the real world, the dirty parts represent the commercial interests, the policy implications, feminist rhetoric, the role of race and class, and the politics of women’s bodies that complicate breastfeeding. Outdated systems include insufficient federal policies and maternity ward protocols that treat birth as a medical event. No dignity refers to nursing mothers being forced to leave public places as if breastfeeding is indecent. And there’s plenty and plenty of noise. The marketing noise. The noise of data confusion. The noise of infant formula marketing. The noise of cultural invisibility and societal pressure.

  The contradictions of breastfeeding mirror the contradictions of motherhood. Mothers who breastfeed in public are either doing a beautiful, natural, environmentally friendly thing and bolstering their infant’s IQ and immune system or they are perverted exhibitionists who judge others, exploit their children, and should be banned from restaurants, run out of grocery stores, and kicked off airplanes.

  In a world where we are fixated on time and overwhelmed with overscheduling, breastfeeding is framed as confining and restrictive because it works best unscheduled. Instead, we should challenge why we have no freedom to be temporarily unstructured or unscheduled or made to feel like less of a woman for exercising this freedom. Especially when, in the long run, breastfeeding helps make a mother’s and a baby’s life much easier. Yes, breastfeeding has nutritional and immunity merits, but it is also offers a way of being close with a baby and that, in itself, is valuable. There are other ways to experience that closeness, of course, and mothers shouldn’t be forced to parent in that way if they don’t want to, but we shouldn’t sabotage those who do.

  The whole situation—just like the breast pump—quite frankly sucks. Mostly because women are unaware of the confluence of forces that undermine their efforts. We’ve drifted far from our biological norms and, without the intergenerational structure of familial support, we are lost and finding our own way. Too many of us end up robbed of the early motherhood experience we desire. Or reliant on an outdated machine to finish the job our culture won’t let us completely fulfill on our own.

  Believe it or not, there was a time when women were valued as breast milk producers and mother’s milk was considered a precious commodity. Unfortunately, it was a very, very long time ago. Wet-nursing began organically and communally and was often the only recourse for an infant whose mother had died, was ill, or could not for some reason be breastfed by its mother. But it did not take long for that genuine act to be commodified and to become a symbol of financial prosperity. Going back as far as ancient Egypt wet nurses were used, mostly by the wealthy, to give their children the benefits rich women considered themselves too posh to provide. Most Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hebrews breastfed their children for about three years, but the wealthier Greeks and Romans hired slaves to wet-nurse. Outside of slavery, wet nurses could only exist because wealthy people could afford them and valued the “product” they could provide.

  As George D. Sussman writes in Selling Mothers’ Milk: “Any mother who could afford to hire a wet nurse would never sacrifice her sleep, her social life, her sexual pleasure (intercourse was supposed to interfere with lactation), or her small earnings in the store or shop in order to suckle and care for her own baby. In traditional society, mothers viewed the development and happiness of infants younger than two with indifference.”

  However, as children increased in value, the economics of exploiting that increased value by developing substitute milk products eventually led to the devaluation of mother’s milk and, ultimately, mothers themselves. In a paradoxical turn of events, as children became more “emotionally priceless,” breast milk lost its economic value, even as the direct and indirect social costs of fewer breastfed babies skyrocketed. Children but not the substance that could make them healthier became more valued.

  The undervaluation of breastfeeding is directly related to the broader undervaluation of motherhood. And many experts argue that the undervaluation of motherhood is directly connected to how we value children. I spoke with Viviana Zelizer, a sociologist from Princeton University and the author of the landmark book Pricing the Priceless Child, which traces the value of children from their focus as sources of labor to becoming of great sentimental value. Zelizer famously surmised that children are “economically useless but emotionally priceless.” The transformation of a child’s value indicates how cultural norms and conventions can trump economic valuations, Zelizer says. It was this shift in valuing children, from sources of labor to objects to be cultivated and groomed, that led to the legal justification of life insurance policies for children and lawsuits and monetary damages related to the injury or loss of children. While children have transformed in value, the ones bearing the brunt of the responsibility of taking care of them are still suffering from a gross undervaluation. In several modes of valuation, time is as important as money, yet a woman’s time away from working has not been properly valued in this country. Zelizer also points out that the messaging of breastfeeding has been one that stresses the emotional and health values of breastfeeding and not the economics of breastfeeding, particularly as it relates to a mother’s time.

  Revaluing breastfeeding will not be easy. We need a new social contract. One where mothering and caregiving is properly conceptualized as work in and of itself, rather than being forced into a model of work built around men’s lives. The time commitment needed for breastfeeding and nurturing our children has value to the economic development and public health of our nation, as well as to the social fabric of our society.

  With so much at stake, how did we end up here? Well, we can partly thank feminism.

  • 6 •

  The Feminist Fallacy

  I have a brain and a uterus, and I use both.

  —PATRICIA SCHROEDER, COLORADO’S FIRST FEMALE MEMBER OF CONGRESS

  If women can’t turn to physicians or to the scientific community for clear support, then surely a women-led movement can fill in the gap. Instead, the mainstream feminist movement has resisted breastfeeding as a women’s rights issue, mostly framing it as a confining, restrictive, unwanted obligation that keeps women at home, tied to the kitchen and, worse, to a demanding baby. Is breastfeeding an empowering act of self-determination—using the woman’s body to produce a life-enhancing food, as only women can do? Or does being at the whim of a chil
d’s demands feel so very 1950s? The feminist vote, by and large, has been for the latter. Formula feeding, they argued, meant liberating women so they could return to work. With that position, feminist leaders fell into the dangerous trap of looking at breastfeeding as an individual issue while ignoring the unfair, systemic barriers to breastfeeding that would typically have women’s rights activists in a tizzy.

  Breastfeeding requires rethinking basic feminist issues such as the sexual division of labor, women’s productive and reproductive lives, and the role of the physiological process of lactating in the context of societal norms. It is an important issue for reproductive justice, human rights, and women, although it is rarely addressed as such. Much reproductive-justice work has been focused on providing access to safe abortions and affordable birth control. While we should, of course, give these important issues our due energy, we must move beyond the language of only helping those who want to avoid pregnancy, terminate a pregnancy, or carry out a pregnancy. That support must extend to families and the children they are raising after pregnancy, and that means talking about breastfeeding.

  This misplaced framing of women’s rights has had a profound effect on women and their infant feeding decisions. It has distorted the reproductive right of breastfeeding and contributed to a dangerous “push to pump” and the separation of mothers from their milk. To be fair, mainstream feminist ideology has also resisted breastfeeding advocacy because of feminism’s aim to reject cultural norms that use guilt and coercion to label a woman’s behavior “good” or “bad,” and that is often the perception around most breastfeeding-awareness campaigns. This is, indeed, a misstep of the breastfeeding movement. But taking a position to resist breastfeeding advocacy without looking at who, exactly, is peddling guilt among mothers or at the public health consequences does a great disservice to all women.

  Instead of the freedom and liberation the feminist movement sought to provide, mothers are more vulnerable, more frustrated, and more overlooked than ever before. Much of that is due to the feminist leadership, who have been focused more on women having a masculinized version of womanhood instead of on revaluing all the roles of a woman—including mothering work—on its own terms.

  The second-wave feminist argument about the oppressive nature of breastfeeding is even more confusing when you consider that formula and the entire formula and baby-food industry were built on the perception that mother’s milk is deficient, that there’s not enough of it, and that the mother isn’t good enough to deliver it appropriately. How exactly is that pro-women? Ironically, it bears mentioning that the origins of our formula culture came from male doctors, who pushed formula on mothers as a “superior” option. The slow loss of control over our bodies came with the “medicalization” of birth and infancy by mostly male physicians, who said women weren’t smart enough to feed their babies without expert advice. Then there’s the medical profession and their collusion and profit sharing with the growing formula industry. By the turn of the twentieth century, a respected physician wrote, “It is easier to control cows than women.” By the 1930s, pediatric research was regularly funded by formula producers. Hospitals sabotaged breastfeeding, separating mothers and babies, insisting on strict feeding schedules, and regularly giving supplemental bottles, even though milk supply is dependent on the frequency and amount of suckling. The standard hospital practice was to sanitize and cover the mother’s body and breasts and scrub her nipples, which clearly conveyed the message that the woman and her body were unclean. Much of this historical context is lost in the women’s movements’ simplistic categorization of breastfeeding as oppressive and bottle feeding as liberation.

  In her infamous motherhood manifesto, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, Élisabeth Badinter speaks vehemently against the popular breastfeeding ideology, which she describes as “Mothers, you owe them everything!” She writes, “A few advocates of breastfeeding do recognize that mothers might feel trapped by political correctness and they challenge the movement’s sentimental image of motherhood with its erasure of all other aspects of breastfeeding: the loss of freedom and the despotism of an insatiable child. They recognize that a baby might be a source of happiness, but also a devastating tornado.” Picking up the mantle of motherhood means dealing with the challenges, the awkward moments, the struggles, the desperation at all points of the parenting continuum, not just the infant phase. Therefore, hinging the “tyranny of motherhood” on infants and, specifically, on breastfeeding is dangerous messaging for women because the “despotism” of parenting or “loss of freedom” is not confined to infant feeding or infancy. As a parent of a teenager, I speak from experience. And as an adult child who still relies on my mother and father for child care support and, in the past, financial assistance, I am still in need of my own parents. As they age, they are more in need of me. Yet we often talk about dependency as some deviant behavior, a terrible thing to be fought against at all odds. In some feminist circles, having our children dependent on us is considered degrading to us as women. Dependency happens: whether you are elderly, disabled, sick, or recovering—it is life, not a crime against womanhood. The conversation should shift to rethinking how our economy could be molded more fairly around valuing care work and phases of dependency.

  Instead, most second-wave feminist scholarship and activism has presented breastfeeding as an “option” or a “choice” that is not very different from formula feeding. A few within the feminist community have recognized breastfeeding as a women’s health issue or a reproductive right. By and large, support for women’s rights generally ignores the rights and importance associated with all of women’s roles, including that of mothers, opting instead to concentrate primarily on other issues such as wage equality, employment, and reproductive freedom.

  It’s a slippery slope that began in the mid-twentieth century as feminists in this country channeled much of their energy into fighting for equal rights with men and freeing women from the imperative to mother. Emerging from the profamily climate of the 1950s, most feminists wanted to put equality first, break the claim of biology, and “denaturalize” nature. The approach of seeking equal treatment and minimizing gender led to significant gains for women, but by the 1980s its limitations were equally apparent. Equality proved to be more difficult to accomplish than many surmised, and, where gained, it was often not what feminists had bargained for. The National Organization for Women has spent over three decades fighting for equal rights in various fields, under the premise that once all the legislation that discriminates against women is dismantled, the playing field will become level and women would assume their rightful place in society as equal to men. The only flaw in this premise is that by looking to be equal to men, we forgot to fight for the things that make us uniquely women—like our ability to birth, lactate, and produce food for our young. These aspects of motherhood were suppressed for the overall goal of being just like men. By the 1980s even Gloria Steinem, the glamorized feminist leader (who does not have any children), quipped, “We have become the men we wanted to marry.” Next came some feminist voices for the “maximizing” approach—that is, celebrating women’s differences—which acknowledges that demanding similar treatment gained entry for a few but left the system relatively unchanged. While the fight to access birth control options and have children on our own terms was critical to the movement, the idea of focusing on mothering thereafter instead of returning to work was definitely frowned upon. We were vocal for the right to have children when we wanted, but then what? Leave them as soon as possible and get back to work? Yes, a woman should not be compelled to become a mother, but what if that was her authentic desire? There was no en masse fight for legislation to have a reasonable federal maternity leave policy. Pregnancy accommodation cases, those in which a pregnant woman alleged she was denied a workplace accommodation needed due to pregnancy, such as help with lifting or light duty, have increased 315 percent over the prior decade, according to a 2016 report on
family responsibilities discrimination by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College. Flimsy legal protections for pregnancy and breastfeeding are a byproduct of pushing for a model of work built around men’s lives, a model that constantly challenges women to find new ways to fit into that mold. And there are other legal consequences to the push for so-called equality with men. For example, the current law for proving gender discrimination cases requires that you produce a male “comparator” who is of a similar situation to prove unequal treatment. Of course, this is virtually impossible for pregnant and breastfeeding women and courts have used this to dismiss several pregnancy discrimination cases. In 2012 testimony before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law, highlighted two glaring examples of equal rights going terribly wrong. In one case, Hess-Watson v. Potter, the plaintiff argued that her employer had held against her the fact that she was on maternity leave in awarding a certain workplace benefit. The court dismissed her suit because she had not identified any man out on maternity leave. Another case involved Kimberly Hern Troupe, who worked at the Lord & Taylor department store in Chicago when she became extremely ill with severe morning sickness. The court awarded summary judgment for the employer on the grounds that the plaintiff had not submitted evidence of a “hypothetical Mr. Troupe” (with severe morning sickness?). The plaintiff’s “failure to present any comparison evidence,” asserted Judge Richard Posner in the majority opinion, “doomed her case.”