The Nation's Pulse / Suckling Up to the Bourgeoisie
Carlson, Allan C.
THE NATION'S PULSE SUCKLING UP TO THE BOURGEOISIE by Allan C. Carlson Breastfeeding holds a somewhat unsavory reputation among conservatives and free enterprise aficionados. Breastfeeders seem to...
...It indicated the willingness of women to place the needs of their babies above everything else, a distinctly bourgeois sentiment captured most poignantly in the nineteenth-century paintings of Mary Cassatt...
...The Chicago press, displaying its much vaunted nose for news, was particularly fascinated by the projected passage of 75,000 used diapers through the Hilton's disposal system...
...Their central tenet was that breastfeeding led to good mothering, which created strong families, which benefited the whole of society...
...It was a vote on par with one to keep liquor away from the Indians...
...Yet the special men's sessions were confused and depressing affairs, much like a gathering of drone bees...
...images that still raise eyebrows among elder generations otherwise (by now) immune to culture shock...
...In these respects, the bourgeois family embodied the deepest, most natural, and most socially constructive of human emotions...
...anti-Western rhetoric accompanied the UN action and that infant formula has a limited nutritional role to play in both the "developed" and "developing" worlds...
...the mothers of ten or more were greeted by wild applause...
...Nursing women- "partially exposed breasts...
...From Soweto to Watts to El Salvador, League women spread their message to the lower classes with the same missionary zeal that the middle class has always brought to its culturally uplifting tasks...
...Dining next to the "limousine liberals" in the finest restaurants are those-let's call them "corporate libertarians"-who find the bourgeois ethic all well and good so long as it doesn't interfere with business...
...There was much talk of their important supportive role, and League doctrine stresses the traditional male bread-winning tasks...
...Today, largely because of the League's efforts, over half of all American mothers breastfeed their newborns...
...In promoting knowledge about the techniques of successful nursing, they confronted a formidable opposition...
...Following the negative American vote on the UN infant formula code last spring, liberal pundits had a field day blasting conservatives for constantly using "pro-family" rhetoric, yet throwing motherhood and babies to the breeze the first time corporate interests were crossed...
...Edward Gibbon, for example, found the disappearance of breastfeeding to be an important symbol of the decline of ancient Roman virtue...
...In contrast to the Cosmopolitan cookie-cutter look exhibited by serious career women, however, League mothers presented a fascinating diversity: here a Menhonite woman in plain clothes accompanied by a dozen children ranging from 16 years to three months...
...This all represents woefully misdirected ire...
...More difficult to fathom were the men present at the convention: the "League Fathers...
...The League's work is done and an international network maintained almost exclusively by a decentralized body of volunteers...
...These women are a unique kind of radical...
...Similarly, according to McKnight, "no other organization in the world influences so many people with so little hierarchy...
...Such "acts of nature," these defenders of decency believe, should occur in the privacy of the home...
...Yet merely to recite the organization's brief history is to overlook the more fundamental impulses behind its existence...
...Hospital routines, from regularly anesthetized deliveries to enforced separations of mothers and babies, prevented most women from successfully lactating...
...Breasts serve as sexual symbols...
...The League's holy writ, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, has sold 1.2 million copies since its first edition appeared in 1958...
...At about the same time, economic growth generated by industrial capitalism began to free a growing number of women from the need to devote their time to field and primitive factory labor...
...that "if God wanted human beings raised in litters [that is, day care centers], He would have sent them in litters...
...The building groaned under the weight of 3,500 mothers from 32 countries and a larger number of newborns, infants, and toddlers...
...Great wealth was not in evidence at the convention...
...They included Whittlestone Breastmilkers, Inc., The Egnell Breast Pump Company, Happy Family Products, Ino-., The AxiCare Human Milk Pasteurizer, and Peek-A-Boo Fashions...
...There is apt symbolism in reports that the Communist government in Poland prohibits La Leche League meetings in that troubled land, because of their alleged "political nature...
...In a very real sense, La Leche League represents a rediscovery of this unique bourgeois family ethic, and a renewed expression of middle-class self-confidence and moral purpose, social attitudes prematurely declared extinct...
...Yet morally, it was a mistake...
...They preside over large families: four or five children are common...
...Likewise, many people of refined sensibility are deeply troubled by spreading public displays of breastfeeding...
...When feminists emerged from the shadows in the early 1960s to press vocally for unfettered personal freedom, the League quietly advanced the counterargument that a baby has a basic need for its mother's love and full-time presence "which is as intense as its need for food.'' As a true matriarchy, the Founding Mothers presided over the League's subsequent expansion and today govern an empire of 12,500 carefully screened and certified "Leaders" who monthly reach over 100,000 women in 40 countries...
...Phil Donahue-fulfilling his fervently held "if a woman does it, it must be good" philosophy-materialized to do a show...
...Here real problems arise...
...It was among these men that the overwhelming truth advanced by George Gilder in Wealth and Poverty hit home: Women are innately superior to men, and much of what we call work and culture are merely clever ploys to keep males out of trouble while women perform the really important and difficult tasks of nurturing the next generation...
...Indeed, the League is the bourgeoisie militant...
...As at all conventions, the exhibitors turned out en masse, displaying once again the endless adaptability of capitalist production...
...there a blind woman with two sighted children, one nuzzling at the breast...
...yet bad, in the suggestion that women have a unique biology which public policy might want to acknowledge...
...There was modest media coverage...
...A symbolic expression of this came a few years back when Governor Edward J. King of Massachusetts-reportedly unnerved by the word "breast"-flatly refused to sign a proclamation declaring "the week of the breastfed baby...
...a blend of a very old and a very new human nurturing technique that strengthens family life and the whole social order...
...for the committed feminist, disturbing themes all around...
...This also wasn't the bowling alley crowd...
...Second, the League has the mark of an authentic "people's movement...
...It is odd how few people have appreciated the irony of an agency of the UN-that asylum where the speeches of every Third World despot and butcher are greeted with the same enthusiasm once accorded the droppings of sacred animals- actually voting to acknowledge the inability of "developing" peoples to handle something as simple as infant formula...
...The size of female breasts unmistakably differentiates women from men...
...On the other hand, the medical evidence is legitimate and overwhelming that breastfeeding is vastly superior to infant formula from the standpoints of health, nutrition, immunology, natural child spacing, cost, and simplicity...
...Concerning the infant formula squabble, for example, it is true that rabid anti-capitalist and Allan C. Carlson is Assistant to the President of the Rockford Institute...
...La Leche League was first envisioned by two women during a suburban Chicago picnic, and the seven "Founding Mothers" began meeting in October 1956...
...Somewhat regrettably, it takes a certain level of fanaticism to accomplish those tasks today...
...The police chief of Paris estimated in 1780 that of 21,000 babies born in his city, 17,000 were shipped off to the rural wetnurses, while another 3,000 were placed in urban nurseries or wetnursed in the home...
...The League, while constitutionally and purposefully secular, floats on a strong undercurrent of faith in a nondenomina-tional God...
...This is good, in that it allows allies to be clearly distinguished from enemies...
...Such squeamishness is surpassed only by the problems that modern feminists have with breasts...
...Historically, breasts havealso served as a means of feeding newborns and infants...
...Instead of being anti-Western, the UN action should be seen for what it was: an implicit request by Third World supplicants for paternalistic, neo-colonial treatment from a clearly superior Western culture...
...The first of these is a shared religiosity...
...Nonetheless, conservative queasi-ness over the breastfeeding act remains...
...Finally, and above all, La Leche League is-in the inappropriately apologetic words of one of its founders-"obviously a middle class organization...
...Held at Chicago's Conrad Hilton, this meeting did not attract your usual convention crowd...
...The sole common denominator among contemporary American women is intensity of personal commitment...
...In 1748, English physician William Cadogan published the first of a flood of influential tracts advocating maternal nursing and other visibly modern child-care practices...
...As New Age sociologist Rosalind Sands has noted, "the most persistent single note in the history of child-rearing has been the reluctance of mothers to suckle their babies...
...Home births, midwives, "family beds," natural foods, and nursing toddlers have become the icons of the movement, particularly among its younger members...
...According to historian Edward Shorter, breastfeeding served as the critical "sacrifice test" in defining the emerging modern family...
...Even Ernest Lefever's failure to win confirmation as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, due in part to his Nestle ties, seems somehow their fault...
...Jean-Jacques Rousseau's mid-century novel, Pamela, gave literary and intellectual respectability to breastfeeding...
...yet bad, because pornographers and other men viciously exploit them...
...And there was a pervasive sense of sexuality about them all...
...The one celebrity League mother at the convention-James Garner's pert photomate Mariette Hartley-appropriately displayed several of these qualities in exaggerated, Southern California fashion...
...Yet a revolution was already brewing...
...Similarly, La Leche League wo men-notwithstanding their apoliti cal protestations-should be recog nized as standing on the front line of the pro-family movement, not pnly talking about families, but having ba bies and raising them in a hostile lib eral culture...
...These are women committed to being "a wife and a mother in the home," speaking out "for mothering as an important and worthwhile ' career...
...This linkage of family and breastfeeding, however, rested on something more fundamental than economics and free choice...
...In challenging this state of affairs, the Founding Mothers brought to their task an almost religious zeal...
...The League proved to be thoroughly, almost quaintly, bourgeois, a fact conditioned by a good deal of history...
...Convention speakers asserted that "the best gift you can give your current children is another brother or sister...
...Add to this a strong mid-century societal aversion to the whole process, and the result was that fewer than one-quarter of new American mothers tried nursing their infants for even a brief period of time...
...better yet, in the bathroom...
...Everyone present had a sense of involvement in something important, but remained unsure of where to go from here...
...Amidst this melange of hang-ups and neuroses, it was a refreshing experience in late July to attend the 25 th Anniversary Convention of La Leche League International...
...There is truth to the charge...
...For the defense and spread of breastfeeding in the modern world should be viewed as a missionary act of positive bourgeois cultural imperialism...
...The meeting's purpose was to celebrate and promote "the renaissance of breastfeeding...
...They appear to be partly responsible for the infamous United Nations code that would uniformly regulate the promotion of infant formula, the recent vote on which left the Reagan administration in embarrassing isolation...
...The resulting maternal-infant bond supplied the vital spark which animated the bourgeois nuclear family...
...Author and physician Niles Newton, in her 1955 minor classic, Maternal Emotions, has described the scientific evidence tying the unique hormones present during lactation to heightened maternal behavior, larger families, and- most significantly-greater confidence among women in their femininity and far less female envy of men...
...In this respect, La Leche League does represent Mothering with a capital "M", an artful combination of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Earth Motherland Ida Morgenstern of "Rhoda...
...Only 700 suckled at the breasts of their natural mothers...
...This is good, in that they help women find personal self-fulfillment...
...He did eventually allow the tender citizens of his state to celebrate "the week of the naturally fed infant...
...As usual, they missed the significance of the event...
...Phrases such as "If You Love Me, Don't Feed Me Junk," "Mother's Milk is Better Than Any Udder Milk," "Smoking Stinks," and "I'm Organically Grown" adorn the tee-shirts of League toddlers and capture this sense of quiet insurrection...
...Breastfeeding implies reproduction, family commitments, maternal love, and restraints on personal liberation...
...A case for the American vote can be made in terms of the precedent which the UN code might set, on narrow legal and anti-trust grounds, or as understandably ornery opposition to anything the UN might try to do...
...Moralists ranging from Heinrich von Louffenburg in the 1400s to John Comenius two centuries later argued in vain against the common West European practice of "wet-nursing,'' or the dispatch of urban-born infants to suckle on the breasts of rural peasants for two or more years, usually with appallingly high mortality...
...Breastfeeders seem to loom behind the sordid attacks on the Nestle Corporation and other infant formula firms...
...are found in public parks, airplanes, shopping centers, and other previously sacrosanct locations...
...It is equally clear that some infant formula marketers have taken advantage of the gross ignorance and gullibility of Third World ladies in giving or selling them products which disrupt the nursing cycle and which they are incapable of properly using...
...For the feminist historians are correct in emphasizing that the ebb and flow of breastfeeding has been closely linked to changes in middle-class values...
...that "society will pay for the working mother...
...In face of professional hostility and governmental indifference, he notes, the League quietly proved by its example, its educational work, and the sheer weight of scientific evidence that breastfeeding is the superior form of infant feeding, a position finally and somewhat grudgingly acknowledged by the American Academy of Pediatrics in the late 1970s...
...The medical profession, obsessed by the technologies of infant formula and surprisingly ignorant of the medical principles of breastfeeding, nurtured a hostility toward nursing mothers that sometimes bordered on paranoia...
...elsewhere, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic with her baby sleeping contentedly on her lap...
...John McKnight, Professor of Communications Studies at Northwestern University, describes La Leche League as "the most legitimate and effective problem solving organization in America...
...Fourth, the League is at the same time thoroughly traditional...
...Its 139 sessions ranged from "technical" themes like "Baby's Position at Breast and Its Relationship to Sucking Problems" to quasi-political matters such as "Legal Rights of the Mother At Home," to fairly grim pop-psychology business like "Father Feelings" and "Father-to-Father Rap Sessions...
...Third, the League has absorbed a dose of the New Age passion for overturning certain social and psychological conventions...
...Labeled "the largest gathering of mothers and babies in the Western hemisphere," it was a display of fecundity unparalleled in recent American chronicles...
...With babies in Snuggli's, toddlers in tow, and new offspring swelling in the human incubators, the message was clear: These gals are fertile...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
