Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture by Bernice L. Hausman

Author:Bernice L. Hausman [Hausman, Bernice L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Non-Fiction, Social Science, Feminism & Feminist Theory, Sociology, History, Anthropology, United States
ISBN: 9781135208271
Google: oAzKAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-06-17T04:57:37+00:00

The !Kung represent for Westerners a specific relation between mother and child (continuous, close contact for the first three to five years of an infant’s life) that is currently less and less common in American practice, as more and more mothers return to waged labor during their children’s infancy or are otherwise involved in public contexts that do not welcome infants or children. They serve a symbolic function in discourses meant to support the so-called traditional nuclear family (in which the mother is available to her children in specific ways), to ground that family form in the natural history of the human species. Thus, as symbols, they serve an ideological function in American breastfeeding advocacy—to promote not only a form of infant feeding practice, but also to provide a template for maternal adequacy that is fundamentally at odds with her dominant cultural context.

Thus, it is not surprising that most U.S. mothers who nurse their babies for an extended period (longer than six months) are white, educated, middle-class women.28 These are the women most likely to have the resources, both personal and financial, to mimic the ancestral pattern of breastfeeding. This is the paradox of the evolutionary perspective on breastfeeding, exemplified in Katherine Dettwyler’s comment that it would make more “cultural sense” for mothers to space out births and nurse their children for years. Her view is that women should choose what is determined by evolutionary theorists to be the best adaptation. What is really at stake in her view is women’s choices as mothers; evolutionary discourses privilege certain choices over others. Expert advice concerning infant care, infant feeding, and other maternal practices always has as its goal the control of women’s actions as mothers. The evolutionary narratives articulated in breastfeeding advocacy discourses operate to promote specific behaviors on the part of privileged, white, American women, on the basis of an interpretation of the practices of primitive, non-Western others. American culture loses because its cultural practices are deemed nonadaptive for infants; but it also wins because it can incorporate the evolutionarily appropriate practices of other cultural traditions through scientific rationalism. American (white) women can be both primitive and modern and, thus, always in their proper place.

Displaced from this relationship are those American women who are neither economically privileged nor white, whose lack of access to medical care and support ironically jeopardizes their ability to re-create the “ancestral pattern” of infant feeding and care. While in the 1990s many of the gains in breastfeeding initiation and duration occurred in mothers involved with WIC (Women, Infants, and Children, a government program providing supplemental foods for poor women and children), class and race remain substantial demographic indicators for breastfeeding. Unlike the black African women who are revered through their continued practice of what are perceived as ancient maternal behaviors, black African-American women are represented as neglectful and dangerous mothers in U.S. public culture (Roberts, Killing the Black Body). I discussed this issue at length in chapter 1. Similar issues emerge in relationship to the American nostalgia for primitive maternal norms.

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