The Big Letdown

by Kimberly Seals Allers

  When courts hold that women can never prove a discrimination case if they cannot identify a similarly situated man, they embrace a male norm, since we asked for equality, that completely ignores and devalues the extents to which women are different from men. Instead of equal protections, women are protected only to the extent they are like men, while men receive across-the-board protections. This is not meant to be the outcome of feminist efforts. What mothers really need from the feminist movement is a bigger push for federal and workplace policies supporting family caregiving, not support for being away from our babies before we actually want to be. But that’s what most women settle into as their “choice.”

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  It’s a cold, wintry day in Chicago and I’m running late to attend an event but in desperate need of some sort of information from the hotel concierge. But the woman in front of me is taking forever. And she’s clearly frustrated. She has a FedEx box in her hand, but the concierge is letting her know that she missed the last pickup time for the day. She sounded on the verge of tears. The concierge was calling other locations to find the best place for her to still make the drop-off deadline for a priority overnight shipment. Whatever was in that box was super important. And just as my mind went all judgmental with thoughts of how our microwave-oven, texting society makes us believe everything is urgent, I heard her say it. With her voice cracking, she tells the concierge that in the box is a padded cooler with her breast milk for her baby and she must ship it home for 9 A.M. delivery. She said it took her two hours to pump enough milk and it must be shipped tonight. The concierge found a suitable location but warned that it could be a forty-dollar cab ride to get there. She grabbed her precious box and the paper with the address and, wiping her tears, she turned and walked quickly toward the hotel exit doors. I felt like I had to do something to support her. Forgetting that I was running late myself, I ran behind her. “You’re doing a really great thing for your baby,” I said, and handed her two twenty-dollar bills—all the cash I had in my wallet at the time. She didn’t want to accept it, even after my “this is from all mothers and babies” speech, so when her cab pulled up, I quickly gave it directly to the driver as she was getting in and quickly walked away.

  She smiled as the cab pulled off.

  And there we were, two women with the financial means to support feeding breast milk to an infant despite the absurdities of how our culture is constructed not to support breastfeeding. Being allowed to pump is meant to be the comforting middle ground, but it alienates the food we produce from the nurturance we provide. On social media, women who must travel for work share road-warrior pumping tips ranging from which coolers are easiest to pass through airport security to which hotels make it easiest to get a fridge in your room and how to use room service to freeze your cooler packs overnight. It’s a survival mechanism for women caught in the crag between their need to work and their desire to mother. Yet it distances us from our children while providing the illusory feeling that we are still able to provide what’s best for our children. Even though that “best” doesn’t include our physical presence. Women are supported to pump but not to mother. The value is placed on the milk, not the mothering. Breast milk may be precious, but breastfeeding is another matter.

  In the language of feminists, women are empowered by asserting the value of both their productive and reproductive work. But what if that productive work includes producing human milk, which is actually an extension of our reproductive work? While building a feminist movement, there was little consideration of the dynamics of a capitalist society, which created a separation between the product and the producer—a mother and her milk. In the past, these two elements were forced to arrive together. But as improved technology helped make it easier to extract the milk from our bodies, the commodification of breast milk escalated—from for-profit milk-banking companies to novelty ice creams and cheeses. As the value of the milk itself increased, a fertile environment developed for the commercialization of human milk. As researchers discover therapies from human milk, scientists are looking into how breast milk can treat intestinal or infectious diseases and how bodybuilders can use it to build muscle. From informal sharing and sales on Craigslist to Web sites like Eats on Feets and Only the Breast, women are looking to buy and sell breast milk as its value rises. Again, breast milk is rising in value, while the act of breastfeeding is in a valuation tailspin.

  Instead of important discussions, we see clamoring over so-called coercion to breastfeed and no understanding of the structural barriers, capitalist forces, and systemic failures that all women face. There’s little dialogue over how we were fed the messaging that breastfeeding is difficult and doomed to failure in the first place and then separated from our milk. And since the feminist approach to breastfeeding was founded on cultural mistruths created in part by the same patriarchal structures that feminists claimed to be rebelling against, it is no wonder that profeminist rhetoric has not helped women feel any happier or fulfilled as mothers.

  That search for fulfillment, not provided by feminist gains, has certainly benefited commercial interests, which often derive their power and purse from a woman’s constantly changing need for identity and the vulnerability of transitioning from an independent, career woman to mother, wife, and caregiver. The uncertainty started in the early to mid-1900s as the role of women began to change. “If a woman is not farming and she’s not having a baby every year due to increased birth control methods, then what is she supposed to do? Women began to look for things to do outside the home,” says Karin Cadwell, a member of the faculty of the Healthy Children Project who convened Baby-Friendly USA, the organization implementing the UNICEF Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative in the United States. “There came ‘The Woman Problem.’” Women transitioned from occupying a predominantly maternal role to having fewer children and participating in the labor force even after childbirth. This drop in birthrates led to fewer visual images of the breast fulfilling its nutritional function, and the sexual elements of the breast became more prominent.

  The so-called woman problem was addressed from all sorts of commercial vantage, from appliances to beauty creams. Women are constantly sold ideas on how to be. In The Feminine Mystique, first published in the United States in 1963, Betty Friedan argued that the very word “feminine,” which sounded like something every woman wanted to be, actually represented an idealized image and a subversive one that kept women as housewives and discouraged any meaningful work outside the home. Women in the mid-twentieth century were taught to pity “unfeminine” career women. Feminine women did not want things like an education, career, or independence. The media images of happy women were in the home, fixating on properly set dinner tables and shining up the latest appliance.

  Commercial interests continue to use advertising to undermine mothers, connecting the “right” to choose between breastfeeding and bottle feeding as a sign of independence—asserting that a woman can achieve identity, self-realization, and fulfillment with the feeding choice for her infant. Feminists agree, arguing that bottle feeding frees women to return to the workforce and to be “independent.” Bottle feeding would create more equitable partnerships with men being able to participate, as if feeding is the only parenting task and men can’t participate in bathing, diaper changing, burping, and playing with a child. And let’s be honest, no woman is ever truly “free” once she becomes a mother. Whether your child is ten days old or ten years old, you will always be constantly consumed with thoughts and worry and angst and joy about your child—forever. You’re inextricably linked for a lifetime. Infancy has its demands. The school years have their demands. My parents still worry about me. This is the beauty, not the burden of the mother-child relationship. Not to mention that your status as an independent individual with your own will and desires is for you to define for all of your motherhood journey, not just the infancy period. And I assure you that it will shift and twist along the way.

  I call it “The Liberation Mystique
” for today’s generation. It’s an equally damaging and subversive message—this idea that we achieve freedom by feeding our babies inferior artificial products and by getting back to working like men. It’s an equally powerful malaise of discontent. We will never be fully fulfilled until all of our selves—our maternal selves, our sexual selves, our lactating selves, our career-climbing selves—are acknowledged. Instead of a one-size-fits-all “liberated” box, we can accept and support all of the variations of “us,” allowing women to become the people they want to be at a given time as they move through different stages of their lives. Nor can we put all perspectives of motherhood in the same barrel. Valorizing motherhood is different from an authentic desire to mother. But there’s been little structural support for the latter and no feminist voices advocating it.

  The ultimate connection between breastfeeding and feminism is that in a truly equitable society, women would have the capacity to pursue both their productive and reproductive work without penalty. In that vein, breastfeeding becomes the perfect lens to see the misogyny of our culture as it impacts mothers: women are harassed and shamed and illegally evicted from public spaces for breastfeeding; women are threatened with losing custody of their children for breastfeeding for “too long”; women are ridiculed and bullied for trying to pump milk at work; women are described as freak shows for breastfeeding twins or tandem feeding; women are called names for breastfeeding; women are told they are sexually abusing their children for breastfeeding; women are told they’re not allowed to keep breast milk in communal fridges because it’s viewed as a bodily secretion and not as food; women are bullied into stopping breastfeeding because breasts are the sexual objects of men; women are told that it is obscene to breastfeed in front of other people’s children or other people’s husbands; women are told their bodies are too fat and too saggy and too veiny to be exposed while breastfeeding; women are told to stay at home with their babies until they are no longer breastfeeding; women are instructed to throw blankets over themselves and their babies if they wish to breastfeed outside the home. The list goes on. This is not the result of some peculiar sensitivity toward babies and small children eating; this does not happen with bottle feeding. This is unique to breastfeeding, and it is about policing women’s bodies and lives. You know, exactly the kinds of things feminists used to get riled up about. The fact that women are harassed and shamed for doing something that women’s bodies do as a routine part of bearing children is a severe societal flaw that should trouble all feminists.

  At times, the language of feminism has led to the undermining of breastfeeding, starting with the word “choice.” The mere word conjures up thoughts of women’s liberation and reproductive justice and hard-won rights and freedoms earned by the feminist movement. In fact, the very essence of women’s liberation was the liberation to make individual choices, whether it be about work, family, or lifestyle. This was most strikingly the case after Roe v. Wade, when reproductive politics made the language of choice synonymous with women’s liberation. As the feminist writer Summer Wood wrote of “choice” in Bitch magazine, “The word’s primacy in the arena of reproductive rights has slowly caused the phrase, ‘It’s my choice’ to become synonymous with ‘It’s a feminist thing to do’—or perhaps more precisely, ‘It is anti-feminist to criticize my decision.’” In the so-called mommy wars and specifically in the milk wars, we see the most perverse form of individualism, where individualizing and privatizing choices around motherhood and breastfeeding has created a dangerous environment. What was once the trademark for women’s rights has become a consumerist tool being used against women. What began as a highly politicized term, in the context of a right to decide to terminate a pregnancy, has now been depoliticized and used for consumer imperatives, as in the “right” to buy all sorts of products marketed to women, from antidepressants, moisturizers, and diet frozen pizzas to infant formula. Implicit in this tactic is that exercising your choice in these matters is in itself a feminist act.

  We see this tactic often in pop culture, such as an episode of the fan favorite Sex and the City, where liberated consumer Carrie Bradshaw (in an episode fittingly titled, “A Woman’s Right to Shoes”) proudly justifies purchasing expensive footwear. The problem with “choice” today is that it has been taken out of the context of women’s rights and misconstrued. In its most disgusting reiteration it is being marketed to women and girls by corporate interests. We are being sold on the idea of choice. The combination of aggressive advertising, medical backing, and a love of consumer freedom has led to a free-market paradise where a host of instant foods are readily available and women have been led to believe that the choice between formula feeding and breastfeeding is merely a matter of personal inclination—a feather in the cap of the quest for liberation. And since choices are individual, they have no social consequences; women are therefore relieved of the responsibility of considering the broader implications of their decisions. And once I make my choice, no one is to challenge me.

  Lately, choice has taken on a concerning meaning in third-wave feminist circles. One of the new iterations of feminism is called “choice feminism.” In contrast to political philosophies that explore the ways in which structural inequality limits freedom, choice feminism tells us that every individual is free to choose and that choice is empowering, no matter what the choice actually is. The result is that the term “choice” is now employed in feminist debates about everything from the sex industry to marriage and makeup to breastfeeding versus formula feeding. Choice feminism dictates that anytime a woman makes a choice, even if it’s to engage in prostitution or pole dancing, it is an act of feminism.

  This is dangerous thinking when the reality is that our “choice” has more limitations than many think and choices based on uninformed decisions founded on marketing propaganda is not true choice at all. It’s particularly dangerous because we fail to differentiate between those who have the privilege of choosing and those who do not, and it avoids any analysis of how race, class, and power actually affect a woman’s choice.

  For one, choice should be based on equal options. Is having the option of breastfeeding versus formula feeding really a choice when the options are not equal? They are so incongruous that it has taken billions of dollars in research and insidious marketing tactics to build the notion that infant formula is just as good. When one option gives your baby preventive health benefits and the other increases your baby’s risk for health problems, then that’s not an actual choice. The options are not equal. The options are not equal when the reasons people give for not breastfeeding include returning to work, perceiving formula as more convenient, and fear-based ideas such as it will hurt or that their breasts won’t produce enough milk. This is not the choice women need.

  It’s easy to see why framing breastfeeding versus formula feeding around individualism is a win-win for the formula companies. Doing so means that the idea can’t be challenged. So, for example, when breastfeeding or formula feeding is framed as an individual choice, the economic interests of selling formula can be disassociated from the conversation. The billions spent on marketing to create doubt among mothers who are undermined from the day they leave the hospital with a free infant formula bag can be removed from the discussion. If breastfeeding is purely a personal choice, it need not have anything to do with greedy corporations, body politics, or a marketing industry that has sold women damaging messages. If breastfeeding is purely a personal choice, then we don’t have to connect the dots between the paltry breastfeeding rates in this country and high levels of childhood allergies, asthma, type 2 diabetes, and obesity.

  Think back to reproductive rights. At this point many women see those rights as accessible, but the right to have an abortion is greater than access. It touches on issues such as the wage gap, health care, education—issues that have as much if not greater impact on the real-life choices of women. Similarly, breastfeeding is far greater than a matter of choice when issues such as employer practices, ch
ild care, and the lack of federal maternity leave play such a large part in how a mother decides to feed her baby. But continuing to frame the issue around choice allows these greater, more influential factors to remain unmentionables.

  Most significantly, keeping breastfeeding as a private choice rather than a public health issue hampers momentum. After all, private choices do not provide the basis for a movement. In fact, framing breastfeeding as a personal choice erases the context of corporate interests and deep-pocketed marketing machines in which it typically occurs. In this context, choice is not liberation. It is suffocation. The dialogue around the real issues that could actually significantly affect our lives, our health, and the health of all infants has been suffocated while we clamor behind choice and use it as a shield to deflect our mommy guilt. Our ability to build conversation and support among ourselves has been stifled because we won’t discuss what we have been told is a private matter. It is women and infants who are paying the price for this so-called freedom. As much as we would like to think that it is impossible for a woman to choose her own oppression and that all choices she makes are equal expressions of her freedom, we know that in reality that is not the case. Of course, no woman would knowingly choose her own oppression, but when that oppression has been packaged as “choice,” a “lifestyle issue,” and “more convenient,” women end up responding to, not choosing, influences and end up oppressed. (Remember Twilight Sleep births.)

  Mothers will be better served when feminism as a movement accepts that breastfeeding is not a “choice.” Breastfeeding is a reproductive right. This is a simple, but remarkably radical, concept. Here’s why: when we frame infant feeding as a choice made by individual women, we place the entire responsibility for carrying out that choice on the individual woman. As Bernice Hausman writes in her “Women’s Liberation and the Rhetoric of ‘Choice’” essay, “In infant feeding debates we position the nursing mother as ‘making a consumer decision, rather than exercising a human right.’” This framework weakens legal protections for breastfeeding families. Courts have determined that the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) does not apply to breastfeeding mothers. Rather than consider it a “related medical condition” with respect to pregnancy, which would give it coverage under the PDA, courts deem breastfeeding to be a choice related to parenting and therefore to be uncovered. “Constructing breastfeeding as a choice that absolves employers from any duty to accommodate it evades the question of whether such choices, when they contribute to the welfare of children, should be supported,” writes Maxine Eichner, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the author of The Supportive State: Families, Government, and America’s Political Ideals. In that environment, women who have control over their bodies, their time, and their lives—typically highly educated, upper-middle-class women—can choose to breastfeed, but most mothers—hourly workers, women from families that require two incomes to survive, poor women required by law to go back to work or forfeit their federal aid—cannot. The lack of response by feminists to these workplace inequities makes breastfeeding a class-based privilege and, therefore, a social justice issue. When we acknowledge that the benefits of breastfeeding, and not just of breast milk, include the psychological benefits that come from the direct interaction between mother and child, then we can see that the advantages of breastfeeding cannot be matched by merely adding more ingredients to infant formula. A woman is required in the equation.