breastfeeding and equally-shared parenting: a personal perspective

One aspect of the hubub in April and May surrounding Hanna Rosin's much-discussed article "The Case Against Breast-Feeding" concerned her conviction that breastfeeding and equal co-parenting are inherently in conflict. She writes:

[A Babytalk Magazine] article opens with a promisingly realistic vignette, featuring a theoretical “You” cracking under the strain of having to breast-feed around the clock, suffering “crying jags” and cursing at your husband. But fear not, You. The root of the problem is not the sudden realization that your ideal of an equal marriage, with two parents happily taking turns working and raising children, now seems like a farce. It turns out to be quite simple: You just haven’t quite figured out how to fit “Part A into Part B.” Try the “C-hold” with your baby and some “rapid arm movement,” the story suggests.

And:

I recalled [a friend who chose not to breastfeed] with sisterly love a few months ago, at three in the morning, when I was propped up in bed for the second time that night with my new baby (note the my). My husband acknowledged the ripple in the nighttime peace with a grunt, and that’s about it. And why should he do more? There’s no use in both of us being a wreck in the morning. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to seethe.

And:

We were raised to expect that co-parenting was an attainable goal. But who were we kidding? Even in the best of marriages, the domestic burden shifts, in incremental, mostly unacknowledged ways, onto the woman. Breast-feeding plays a central role in the shift. In my set, no husband tells his wife that it is her womanly duty to stay home and nurse the child. Instead, both parents together weigh the evidence and then make a rational, informed decision that she should do so. Then other, logical decisions follow: she alone fed the child, so she naturally knows better how to comfort the child, so she is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick, and so on. [...] The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.

A lot of formal and informal systems push women in our society to take on the bulk of housekeeping and parenting labor even when we don't want that role, and even when we work and/or earn as much as or more than our male partners. That's true and important. But we can say that without saying that no one could possibly do "meaningful work" while breastfeeding exclusively (among other things, I wrote my dissertation and taught several courses and presented at conferences and, rather importantly, did the deeply meaningful work of parenting itself) or that no marriage could possibly involve an equal distribution of domestic labor, especially if breastfeeding is involved (mine does and did, because it's equally important to both of us and because we agree about what an equal distribution of domestic labor looks like for us; it never even occurred to me until I read this article that breastfeeding could somehow challenge or unsettle that agreement). Treating these difficulties and tendencies as inherent or natural doesn't help us understand, analyze, navigate, and fight against those larger formal and informal systems. It also deletes the enormous diversity of parenting experiences--and experiences of breastfeeding--along lines of class, race, cultural context, region, religion, profession, education level, etc., etc. as well as nuances of personality, relationships, values, past experiences, and expectations.

The 'logic' of the third long quotation above is bizarre. There is no actual reason that someone who breastfed a child "naturally knows better how to comfort the child, [...] is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick, and so on." My husband always feeds our now-nearly-three-year-old son unless I'm the only one around; it's unimaginable that someone would assume he's therefore the best-equipped to hug him when he's crying or choose his preschool or decide whether we need to call the pediatrician. Part of the issue is that Rosin basically assumes that breastfeeding=being the stay-at-home parent, and I take issue with that assumption. But I think an even larger problem is that the claim's logic seems based on breastfeeder=sole cuddler/caregiver/provider-of-loving-interaction. And an even larger problem is that the claim really only makes sense in a culture that assumes women are naturally more nurturing and better suited to the role of primary parent (=Mommy) than men. The breastfeeding bit is a side issue; it's not as though most contemporary US formula-feeding families involve men taking on an equal share of household and parenting duties. Men are slighted by the assumption that they're not competent to care for their own children, and women are overloaded by the demand that they take on a disproportionate weight of parenting responsibility. But, again, not lactation's (or lactivists') fault, and not solved by formula.

Not all couples want equally-involved parenting roles. In some families, the ideal arrangement is for one person to work outside the home and the other to stay at home as the primary caregiver, and the hope is more modestly that the work-outside-the-home parent will participate actively when he or she is at home outside working hours. Some families only involve one parent, so this whole question is irrelevant. And so forth. But a lot of people in two-career families do want to establish fair (meaning more or less equally-responsible and equally-engaged) parenting roles that don't require the mother to be a full-time primary caregiver as well as a full-time [insert job title here] by cultural default. That can be tough because it defies deeply-embedded cultural values and norms about Wives and Mommies and Husbands and Dads and Families and Homes and so forth. But I really don't think breastfeeding is the problem. Maybe the straw that broke the camel's back in some cases, but not the basic problem. And in any case, it truly is possible to breastfeed without realizing in the middle of the night that the values on which you've built your marriage are farcical, and without any seething at all. What bothers me about the statements I've quoted above is certainly not Rosin's discussion of her own, real and valid and significant, experience but rather her claim to the universality and and unavoidable nature of that experience. Somehow, in this article's universe, neither I nor my marriage exists.

Some strategies, if the goal is breastfeeding in combination with equally-shared parenting (or something along those lines):

• Actually talk about this stuff as far ahead as possible, not just in sunny generalizations but in informed detail. Even if you're pretty sure you're on the same page.
• Be with someone who shares your expectations and ideals regarding marriage and parenting, again not in sunny generalizations but in informed detail.
• Consider whether it would be a good idea for both of you to read all the pregnancy/birth/breastfeeding books. In any case, avoid the typical situation in which the male partner knows nothing about these experiences and the pregnant/birthing/lactating female is the sole expert.
• Remember that "fair" and "equal" are defined by you and your partner. They're not mathematical terms. They're not threatened by the fact that only the mother can breastfeed, since it would be insane to divide each individual household and parenting task in half regardless of interest/enjoyment/tolerance and ability. During the early months of exclusive breastfeeding and nighttime wakings, the nonbreastfeeding partner just needs to participate in nonbreastfeeding ways, however it feels fair to both partners.
• The person who's lactating doesn't have some sort of monopoly on knowing and taking care of the baby. If you want to parent equally, avoid setting up either parent as The Expert on the child, regardless of feeding method. In a breastfeeding family, that means the nonbreastfeeding partner also cuddles, has skin-to-skin time, changes diapers, etc., etc.
• Think and talk about what's important to each of you. And keep talking if something goes all wonky. Shocking; I know :)

For me, for instance, equal parenting involves fair divvying up of that sweet nectar of the gods, sleep. Not necessarily mathematically equal hours/minutes of sleep--my husband has always needed and wanted less sleep than me, baby or no baby--but fair opportunity for each of us to get reasonably close to whatever amount and quality of sleep we need to function. In our family, that meant my husband always went to fetch the hungry baby and did any diaper-changing that needed doing (my husband's an absurdly heavy sleeper, so that was typically after I'd shaken him awake in response to hungry baby noises coming in through the monitor); I breastfed the baby still lying in our bed until he passed out again, full and content; I woke my husband again so that he could take our son back to his crib. This picture would look different, of course, for partners with different sleep needs or for a co-sleeping family (where no baby-fetching needs to occur) or with a baby who takes bottles more happily than ours did or whatever. The point is that sharing nighttime parenting responsibilities is quite possible in the context of exclusive breastfeeding. We slept in overlapping shifts in the early days, when the baby was up a lot and needed lots of late-night and early-morning cuddling beyond breastfeeding.

We were equally tired and equally happy and equally in love with our son, which is how we knew we were equally sharing in parenting.

A few relevant links:

• "Breastfeeding and the Equal Sharing of Responsibilities between Women and Men" (joint statement: Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, International Lactation Consultant Association, La Leche League International, and World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action"
  
• Lisa Belkin's "Equally Shared Breast-Feeding"
• "The Case Against Breastfeeding: Is it Anti-Feminist?" at Ph.D. in Parenting

Countee Cullen, "Saturday's Child"

Here's Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen's "Saturday's Child," which I found online here. Unlike the vast majority of the birth-related poems I've found, this one admits the existence of poverty, the unjust violence of the class system, and their impact on birth experiences and outcomes for both mothers and babies. (Interestingly, as a friend's advisor mentioned to me at a party last year, Cullen also wrote children's books: My Lives and How I Lost Them and The Lost Zoo.)

Saturday's Child

Some are teethed on a silver spoon,
With the stars strung for a rattle;
I cut my teeth as the black raccoon--
For implements of battle.

Some are swaddled in silk and down,
And heralded by a star;
They swathed my limbs in a sackcloth gown
On a night that was black as tar.

For some, godfather and goddame
The opulent fairies be;
Dame Poverty gave me my name,
And Pain godfathered me.

For I was born on Saturday--
"Bad time for planting a seed,"
Was all my father had to say,
And, "One mouth more to feed."

Death cut the strings that gave me life,
And handed me to Sorrow,
The only kind of middle wife
My folks could beg or borrow.

encouraging news from Canada

I'm on a long holiday in England, so my posts have been on autopilot--but I just had to point to a very encouraging move toward evidence-based maternity care and genuine choice in Canada, whose Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has issued new guidelines regarding breech birth. Basically, the Society acknowledges that both evidence and ethics weigh against automatic cesarean for breech presentation and recommends evaluating each woman/pregnancy and offering planned vaginal birth where appropriate. It logically follows that, as the statement also recommends, obstetricians need training and mentoring in facilitating vaginal breech birth. The lack of trained, experienced breech birth attendants in the US scares the crap out of me, so I'm happy to hear a push toward improving the situation up north, at least. I also find it fascinating that medical 'truth,' knowledge, and practices vary so wildly amongst English-speaking cultures whose science is supposedly based in the exact same principles--for instance, the almost diametrically-opposed stances on home birth of ACOG (USA) and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (UK), and now this difference in attitudes toward breech presentation in Canada and the States.

For more details, see the relevant posts at Stand and Deliver and Public Health Doula.

gorgeous pregnant women

The first time I ever spent any extended period of time with a pregnant person, I was in my early twenties, teaching and working in the writing center at a community college. The director of the writing center was in the process of growing her first child, and it was FASCINATING to me. She was absolutely gorgeous, and visibly growing from week to week. I had a hard time not staring. That was the beginning of my 'I would look great pregnant' thought process. Partly because we were of similar build and not too far apart in age, but far more importantly because she was a very hard-working and intelligent teacher and scholar who planned to (and did) continue seamlessly with her career alongside parenting, I identified with this woman and internalized my admiration of her childbearing body so that it was also directed toward my own (potential, future) pregnant form.

I still have to tell myself to stop ogling pregnant women. And I did think I was absolutely gorgeous during my pregnancy, as soon as I was really and truly showing. But lots of women don't feel that way at all ...

From my personal observations and conversations, I know that many, many women experience pregnancy as a time of exacerbated body anxiety--if you've always worried about being fat(=ugly) and/or obsessed with belly fat, it can be emotionally difficult to accepting a hugely expanding belly ... and, for many women, larger thighs and so forth as well. Plus the common idea that 'your body will never be the same again' (probably not, but why the foreboding tone? it won't necessarily be less good, just different) and that the first pregnancy marks the end of hotness--or, relatedly, that Mommies aren't supposed to be sexual anyway. Some others see pregnancy as a welcome license to 'let themselves go,' to eat unhealthily and excessively in a way that their internalized 'body police' have never allowed before. (Of course, that perspective is situated in a cultural perspective wherein A) eating habits are determined by the pressure to be thin/'sexy' rather than a desire to eat healthily and be healthy and B) pregnant=unsexy, and all this stuff can cause significant stress and pain down the road since the same cultural pressures insist that a body ought to return to its pre-pregnancy shape right away because it's no longer pregnant and must therefore be thin/'sexy' again.) This post at Fearless Birth begs people to stop telling pregnant women that they're "huge":

Do people REALLY not “get” how difficult it is for a pregnant woman to hear the words, “My God! You’re HUGE!” And no matter how well-adjusted and self-confident you are, those words sting just a little. Admit it. In this culture of “skinny-pop-star-size-0-is-beautiful”, no matter how much we reject the Barbie doll ideal, hearing how huge you are on a semi-regular basis would wear down the staunchest anti-Hollywood image fiend.

On the other hand, some of us really do love hearing that we're unbelievably enormous--as one doula acquaintance said, "When else is a big belly good in our culture?!?" For me, "you're huge!" meant "oh, wow, you're really pregnant! what an amazing belly--you're a gorgeous fertility goddess!" (I have a freakishly happy soundtrack running in my head when I'm pregnant, apparently.) I was initially surprised to find that so many pregnant women are so miserable with their bodies and bellies, which is a totally silly reaction on my part, given our culture's immense pressure on women to be skinny and stereotypically sexy at all times. And to have, you know, waists that go in instead of out. I think it's really important for everyone who interacts with pregnant women--which means pretty much everyone--to bear in mind that different women have very different perspectives on our own pregnant bodies. To listen to a pregnant individual as an individual before making assumptions and commenting on her body willy-nilly.

I haven't had a chance to look into this part yet, but--is there any interesting research/writing on pregnant bodies, weight gain in pregnancy, etc. from a feminist body image / body acceptance perspective? I know there are pregnancy/birth resources aimed at women of size (see for instance here and here), but I don't know what sort of research exists on body image in pregnancy, or on its relationship with depression, birth outcomes, support systems, etc. I should poke around on the article databases sometime ...

more perspectives on feminism and breastfeeding

Food for thought: Here are brief excerpts from several thought-provoking scholarly articles that address (potential and actual, conceptual and activist, historical and current) relationships between feminisms and breastfeeding. Especially viewed as a group, these articles offer some much-needed perspective (or, rather, a number of much-needed perspectives), I think.

from Deborah McCarter-Spaulding, “Is Breastfeeding Fair? Tensions in Feminist Perspectives on Breastfeeding and the Family” (Journal of Human Lactation 24.2 [May 2008]):

[Bernice] Hausman [in her 2003 book Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture] presents a compelling argument that those privileged to have the choice to breastfeed (often middleclass white women) need to use their social capital to make breastfeeding possible for all women. Feminist health activism includes working to remove structural barriers to breastfeeding, such as economic barriers, lack of appropriate support from medical personnel, and work/family patterns. […] Exhorting a woman to breastfeed without appropriate assistance will only contribute to her burden and produce guilt.

from Penny Van Esterik, “Breastfeeding and Feminism” (International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 47 Suppl. [1994]):

Women's groups and feminist groups should put breastfeeding on their agendas and commit their valuable time and resources to breastfeeding campaigns and programs for the following reasons:
• Breastfeeding requires structural changes in society to improve the position and condition of women.
• Breastfeeding confirms a woman's power to control her own body, and challenges medical hegemony.
• Breastfeeding challenges the predominant model of woman as consumer.
• Breastfeeding challenges views of the breast as primarily a sex object.
• Breastfeeding requires a new definition of women's work -- one that more realistically integrates women's productive and reproductive activities.
• Breastfeeding encourages solidarity and cooperation among women at the household, community, national, and international level.
Although breastfeeding is recognized as a women's issue, it is seldom framed as a feminist issue. [Yet] breastfeeding is a paradigmatic feminist issue because it requires rethinking basic issues such as the sexual division of labor, the fit between women's productive and reproductive lives, and the role of physiological processes in defining gender ideology. […] Breastfeeding requires negotiating a number of socially constructed dualisms that have dominated western thinking. These discursive categories that have shaped and continue to shape the way we experience and understand the world include oppositions such as:
production vs. reproduction;
public vs. private;
nature vs. culture;
mind vs. body;
work vs. leisure;
self vs. other;
maternal vs. sexual.
Breastfeeding in theory and practice bridges many of these oppositions and dissolves others.

from Jules Law, “The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing Labor” (Signs 25.2 [Winter 2000]):

[The literature on breastfeeding overwhelmingly] foreground[s] one dimension of the issue (risk) disproportionately while relegating another (the domestic division of labor) to an almost invisible background. A thorough analysis of infant feeding would have to relativize and contextualize the risks of infant-feeding methods much more rigorously and attend far more closely to the picture of family life, the politics of gender, and the domestic division of labor that are assumed in most work on the subject. [...] The risks posed by various methods of infant feeding need to be regarded as relative and rationally calculable, rather than as categorical and sacrosanct. […] Further dissociating breastfeeding from other aspects of child care to which it is in fact neither necessarily nor exclusively connected (e.g., intimacy and bonding) may offer a vision with trade-offs and decisions very different from the ones generally pictured in breastfeeding literature. To a working mother, for instance, it might be more important to know whether the bulk of breast milk's immunological benefits are passed on to her baby by two, four, or six weeks of breastfeeding (since these differences bear on tangible maternity-leave policies and demands) than to know that a year of it reduces by a fraction of a percentage point her baby's chance of getting a rare childhood disease. […]

Furthermore, very few studies of infant feeding adequately interrogate the extent to which the gendered division of domestic labor - and specifically child-raising labor—is presupposed by various infant-feeding "solutions." […] The goal ought not to be the separation of this particular decision from its surrounding social variables in order to make it an unconstrained one; infant-feeding decisions are necessarily and productively connected to a host of other choices and constraints. [… I]nfant-feeding decisions ought to be explicitly understood as questions about balancing the labors, pleasures, well-being, development, and opportunities of a household's various members and, furthermore, as decisions that open, rather than assume the answer to, the question of who cares for children and in what ways. Just how these decisions will be arrived at is a complex and context-specific question; none of the points made here is intended to suggest that the negotiation of child-raising responsibilities can simply take place within a neutral medium purged of asymmetries of power, privilege, and resources. Perhaps, however, we can begin to acknowledge how many common assumptions about infant feeding are covertly grounded in such asymmetries.

from Diane Thulier, “Breastfeeding in America: A History of Influencing Factors” (Journal of Human Lactation 25 [2009]):

During the 1960s, a second wave of feminism took hold in America. The new feminist desire was to glory in women’s ability to control their own bodies. There was a desire to overthrow many of the male and medical areas of control. Interestingly, breastfeeding continued to hold little appeal even for those second-wave feminists. […] In Feminism, Breasts and Breast-Feeding, Pam Carter thoughtfully discussed this ambivalence […,] ponder[ing] whether women should attempt to minimize gender differences as the path to liberation or if they should embrace and enhance gender differences by fighting to remove the constraints placed on them by patriarchy and capitalism. One might see bottle-feeding as freeing women from the demands and restrictions of lactation or, on the other hand, as imposed on women by formula manufacturers depriving them of a unique womanly experience.

Despite the apparent discord, the feminists’ efforts to empower women and change the delivery of health care had a dramatic and positive effect on breastfeeding rates in this country. Starting after 1968, this second wave of feminism was responsible for encouraging women to develop their own knowledge and understanding. [...] Yet, not all women shared the same points of view in regards to their roles and positions in society. The La Leche League (LLL) was an excellent example of women who, although sharing some of the same goals as the feminists, espoused a very different ideology. […] The LLL was born of Catholic moral discourse on family life. Members believed in the tenets of male-female complementarily as grounded in traditional Christian beliefs about essential differences between men and women. Many feminists questioned these assumptions. What unfortunately remained was a reciprocal feeling of suspicion between feminists and members of the La Leche League. Despite this conflict, both groups would do much to advocate for the return of breastfeeding to the American culture.

Jacqueline H. Wolf, “What Feminists Can Do for Breastfeeding and What Breastfeeding Can Do for Feminists” (Signs 31.2 [2006]):

[In the early twentieth century, f]eeding schedules, although antithetical to the supply-and-demand trigger of human milk manufacture, became the watchword. And so women were likely right [when there appeared to be a sudden epidemic of low milk supply]—their bodies were not producing enough milk for their babies. However, the phenomenon was due to cultural rather than physical or evolutionary causes. [...] Economic pressure, class conflict, and changing views of time, efficiency, self-control, health, medicine, science, sex, marriage, motherhood, and nature prompted women of all classes to begin to doubt the efficacy, propriety, and necessity of breastfeeding. Women’s complaints of insufficient milk are worth particularly close examination, however, because that disturbing condition invited doctors’ involvement. [...] Doctors theorized that women’s complaints of insufficient milk were wrought by dual evils: the “overcivilization” and the “overeducation” of women. […] By the 1930s, lack of faith in the efficacy of breastfeeding had become the cultural rule.

[...]

[The] prominence of LLL in the breastfeeding world has made some feminists wary about taking a stance on breastfeeding. In 1940, 25 percent of American workers were women. By the mid-1950s, when LLL began its work, that percentage had risen to one-third. Many of these women had children: 18.6 percent of women with children under six and 39 percent of women with school-age children worked outside the home (Blackwelder 1997, 195, 225). Yet as membership in LLL burgeoned, the organization declared mothering the paramount activity in women’s lives. In the 1963 edition of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, the league never hinted that a significant percentage of mothers with young children left their homes to work nor did it suggest how a mother might mesh breastfeeding and working […]. Historian Lynn Y. Weiner describes LLL’s philosophy during those years: “The basic requirement for successful child rearing was a full-time, attentive mother who understood and accepted her ‘special vocation in life’” (Weiner 1994, 1370). [...] The league did not explicitly recognize the reality of contemporary women’s lives until the fourth edition of its best seller in 1987, when the organization finally offered practical advice to mothers who wanted to continue breastfeeding when they returned to work. […] The chapter on “Breastfeeding and Working,” however, ended by urging new mothers to think carefully before returning to work: “The early months and years set the course for the rest of your child’s life, and they can never be recaptured” […].

[...]

In lobbying for societal support of breastfeeding mothers, feminists can simultaneously reopen a national dialogue about an array of currently dormant feminist goals: lower breast cancer incidence, equitable treatment in the workplace, legal protections to stay home and care for an infant without harming a career, day care close to work sites, flexible work hours for mothers of young children, better informed consumers of medicine, and healthy body image for young women.

WHO on continuous labor support

The World Health Organization's document "Continuous support for women during childbirth" (in the WHO Reproductive Health Library) summarizes the evidence available in 2007 thus:

Continuous support during childbirth leads to slightly shorter labour, greater likelihood of spontaneous vaginal birth, and reduced need for intrapartum analgesia. Women who receive continuous support are less likely to report dissatisfaction with their childbirth experience.

These are familiar points to people who've experienced doula training or read much about doulas or other forms of labor support, of course. The Evidence Summary asserts furthermore that:

In general, the positive effects were stronger when: (i) other sources of support were not available; (ii) epidural anaesthesia was not routinely used; (iii) one-on-one support was provided by someone who was not an employee of the hospital; and (iv) the support started early in labour.

Obviously no doula would want his or her services to be made more effective by the withdrawal of wanted partner/family/friend support and excellent nursing staff (preferably way less understaffed and overworked than in the current US hospital system!)--though, equally obviously, this point brings up the problem by which women with an existing support system are more likely to be able to access and afford a doula (and even more likely to be encouraged to use a doula) than are women in tough situations who would really, really benefit from professional labor support. And though the routine use of epidural anesthesia is disturbing to me, I certainly believe that women who make the informed decision to have an epidural should get one right away and with excellent continuing support. But factor iii is intriguing! As for factor iv, I know that most doulas encourage their clients to get in touch as soon as they think they may want labor support, whether still at home or on their way to a hospital or birthing center (or with their midwives on the way for a homebirth, of course--I don't like it that the WHO document assumes that the only reason a homebirth might occur is that the woman lacks "access to birthing facilities" ...). Factor iv also reminds me of a largely-impossible wish I harbor: I wish clients would contact doulas sooner in their pregnancies, with lots of time to develop trust and familiarity and to offer support through pregnancy as well as birth and new parenthood. I wonder whether an existing relationship with the labor support person makes any statistical difference in factors such as satisfaction with the birth experience? I'm guessing yes ...

The WHO document argues "that common objections to implementation of this intervention [continuous labor support] can be overcome easily." Perhaps the most relevant of these objections to a US context is the possible reluctance of hospital personnel to accept the presence of doulas, about which the document claims:

Labour ward staff usually bring up the issue of lack of staff to care for the additional support persons and how this may impact on their daily workload. Hospitals that have implemented a clinical practice guideline for continuous support have found that in fact this is not the case. After implementation of such a clinical practice guideline it has generally been found that trained staff had more time available as the support person did time consuming tasks, for example, providing cold flannels and back massages, thus freeing the health professional to have more time for other essential labour cares.

Can we say 'obviously'?

breastfeeding, sexism, and feminism

Partly because of Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article "The Case against Breast-Feeding," several versions of 'Do you think breastfeeding is antifeminist?' have been addressed to me in casual conversation of late. 'So-and-so [the father of a young baby] keeps telling me breastfeeding is antifeminist,' 'Have you read that article that says breastfeeding is antifeminist?,' 'What does it mean to say breastfeeding's antifeminist?'

When I ponder that last question--what "breastfeeding is antifeminist" (a friend's words, not Rosin's) could possibly mean--I'm imagining an individual's stance on an incredibly complicated set of issues. Does he or she mean that the act of breastfeeding is itself antifeminist and that I am wrongly perpetuating patriarchal systems/ideas because I breastfed and am enthusiastically looking forward to breastfeeding our next child? Or that encouraging people to try breastfeeding (or to seek help rather than switching to formula if problems arise) is antifeminist? Or that it's antifeminist to do that in the context of a system that makes breastfeeding unreasonably difficult for many women (because of the lack of paid parental leave, flexible working hours, conveniently-located/affordable/high-quality childcare, cultural norms supporting equal parenting and housekeeping, etc.)? Or that these systems that pose so many challenges for caregivers--not just breastfeeding mothers but all mothers, fathers, and other caregivers to adults as well as children--are themselves the problem, and "breastfeeding is antifeminist" is really just a confused/confusing shorthand?

It seems to me that feminists ought to support women's individual informed decisions regarding what we do with our breasts and our babies, but not just in the easy whatever-she-chooses sort of way. Choices aren't made in some fantasyland individualistic vacuum outside cultural pressures and constructions, economic realities, family structures, and so forth. Instead, feminists ought also to work to make both breastfeeding and formula-feeding genuine options and to allow for truly informed choices in infant feeding (much as feminists have worked over the past few decades for greater self-determination and informed consent in childbirth practices and other healthcare arenas). Now, in my experience and observation, a lot more people want to breastfeed but find that formula is the only workable option than vice-versa; I believe we have a lot of work left to do before every woman will have the (practical and social) support that successful, comfortable, happy breastfeeding requires. And by 'successful, comfortable, happy breastfeeding' I mean in the context of a woman's life, not at the expense of her well-being and life beyond parenting, and not merely (though also importantly) the practical matter of a physically comfortable latch and satisfactory milk production and infant growth. Breastfeeding support, and the large body of pro-breastfeeding literature, often fails miserably on this point.

It's also clear that we have a lot of work to do before every woman feels free to choose a feeding method without worrying about what other people will think or say, not because these women are weak-willed but because there's a hell of a lot of pressure out there when you bring a baby into the picture. Ditto for every woman knowing matter-of-factly and without guilt that she gets to have needs and desires that count and need to be balanced in a sane way with those of her baby.

But I absolutely do not believe that these projects--working toward greater support of breastfeeding, greater freedom of choice regarding feeding method, and greater self-kindness amongst mothers--are in any way contradictory or in competition with each other. Instead, in the big picture, better conditions for caregivers in general are better conditions for mothers who choose to breastfeed. These points lead me back to the already-much-discussed Rosin article.

To a radical feminist who breastfed super-happily and intends to do it again, Rosin's tone is pretty damned off-putting in its universalizing approach to her own experiences, its insistence that breastfeeding is inherently destructive of equal parenting (I'll write more about that in another post soon) or that women cannot sanely have both career and breastfeeding or that breastfeeding is experienced as a sacrifice by all women--none of which has been even vaguely true in my own life. These message can't hurt me because I already know that both her experience and my experience are real possibilities, so I just sort of found the article uninteresting ... until I was saddened to encounter people who had read it and become worried that those implications of universality are valid: that breastfeeding will necessarily lead to resentment and all sorts of problems in their careers, relationships, partners' involvement in parenting, etc. (I also believe that Rosin overstates the lack of scientific consensus on the benefits of breastfeeding to both baby and mother, but that's been covered all over the internet and is irrelevant to my concerns here.) Her points regarding feminism and breastfeeding are basically as follows:

• Lots of the pro-breastfeeding literature, and parenting (read: mothering) literature more generally, is antifeminist. Our childbirth/parenting culture tends to treat baby's needs, preferences, whims, etc. as paramount and mothers who have needs, preferences, whims, etc. as selfish and in conflict with our babies. She's right: that's insane. These attitudes and cultural narratives create immense problems and unnecessary suffering for actual human beings who are trying to parent.
• People should stop being crappy about other people's parenting choices. I totally agree. No one should bully or shame a formula-feeding family for using formula. No one should bully or shame a breastfeeding family for breastfeeding, either--and, as most of us know perfectly well, a mother is likely to get all sorts of unsolicited advice and judgment about feeding method regardless of what that method happens to be. Either because she hasn't experienced it in her social circle or because it's irrelevant to her point, Rosin barely mentions the judgment faced by many breastfeeding mothers for nursing in public, for nursing 'too long' (past six months / a year / whatever arbitrary weaning point the judge has in mind--When are you going to wean that baby?!?), for nursing at all. All this crappiness in both directions is crappy. People should be nice, just like we tell our kids.
• And then this: "In Betty Friedan’s day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around—a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the 'happy housewife heroine,' as Friedan sardonically called her. When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Book—a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up—the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound."

I can't get behind that last bit. I just can't. I absolutely agree that the imagery of breastfeeding/mothering/birth/etc. publications is problematic, generally communicating a romanticized, strictly-defined, and highly domestic vision of motherhood. But that's the publishing industry being sexist and oppressive, or the childbirth industry being sexist and oppressive--it has nothing to do with "the sucking sound." If the act of breastfeeding can feel oppressive in our society, then there are obviously problems in how our institutions and culture treat breasts, parenting, work, domestic responsibilities, children, sexuality, the public/private dichotomy, and so forth.

I feel compelled to note that, for me, breastfeeding was most certainly not like vacuuming. It was not an unpleasant, noisy, tiring chore; it was a physically and emotionally pleasurable experience and an opportunity to do huge amounts of academic work while I had a hand or two free. It was, in fact, liberating. Pumping was a lot more like vacuuming in the 'chore' sense (and my particular pump requires two hands--no responding to emails then!), but after a couple weeks of adjusting to the idea, it was fast and a non-issue. And, for me, breastfeeding was not at all oppressive or a sacrifice; it was the simplest, cheapest, most enjoyable way to feed our baby. That's not true for everyone, for every personality or family arrangement or work schedule, but it's also not an unimaginable or unrealistic perspective. In fact, if everyone had my advantages--supportive partner, flexible work schedule, midwifery care that expressed great faith in my ability to breastfeed in the context of my real life, excellent access to information, a town where breastfeeding in public is completely acceptable--it would be a whole hell of a lot more realistic for lots of people.

The larger issue, of course, is that US corporate culture and labor laws create a situation in which breastfeeding (and indeed caretaking far more broadly understood) is ill-supported. All this concern over infant feeding is therefore occurring in a context that's deeply sexist, not only in the popular sense of 'bad for women' but also in the sense of 'bad for men and boys as well as women and girls, because it reinforces the entire system by which we grant huge and arbitrary meaning to the difference in sex organs.' That may sound weird, since of course breastfeeding in a mother-father-baby family means the female partner feeds the baby based on her secondary sex characteristics. But that's not an arbitrary distinction (I really do have mammary glands, and my partner really doesn't), and it shouldn't be universalized (such that all women must give birth and breastfeed in order to be 'real women' or 'real mothers'--as sometimes, very unfortunately, is taken to be the case). Instead, the large-scale problem is that our institutional and cultural dynamics put immense pressure on families to reproduce what is already normal, regardless of the personal cost to those families. Non-gender-based paid family leave (for people who need to care for aging relatives, ill spouses, etc. as well as for new babies), affordable high-quality childcare near parents' places of employment (or onsite childcare in the cases of large employers), and flexible work schedules (again, not just for parents, let alone just for mothers) would help eliminate the culturally-constructed conflict between breastfeeding and everything else many of us need: the ability to pursue professional and/or social activities; a fair division of domestic and parenting labor; strong relationships with other adults; a continued sense of self, personal autonomy, and self-worth, all of which actually can be enriched rather than torn apart by breastfeeding when the context makes sense.

The point is that it seems easy to miss the forest for the trees here. Breastfeeding can end up contributing to resentment and being stuck in an unwanted domestic role because caregiving is gendered feminine and wildly undervalued in our society, and because we live in a capitalist culture that doesn't give a shit about people, and because our culture tells us that pregnant women and mothers are public property and can be guilt-tripped, judged, and corrected by whomever pleases (and therefore often make 'choices' in a social context that undermines genuine and confident decision-making), and because a lot of people are grossed out by the idea of a woman feeding her child from her breast in public, rather than because of anything inherent to breastfeeding itself. All of that crap is what's "antifeminist"--not breastfeeding itself.

labor time, clock time, & story time, part III

(the final installment of a III-part series)

The stories posted to the large online collection The Labor of Love suggest that a lot of birth stories do very much reconstruct the birthing experience within one of a few conventional narrative sequences. They rely heavily on dates, times, hours, and minutes. They order what was presumably a messy experience into a linear sequence with a tidy, happy ending, a little bundle of joy: in fact, as a group, they’re surprisingly like A Baby Story.

Extremely few of the 700+ stories at The Labor of Love reflect directly upon the sorts of temporal experiences Cheryl Tatano Beck found so readily when she asked women “to please describe in as much detail as possible [your] lived experience of time passing during labor and delivery.” For instance, only two of the stories include the phrase “sense of time.” Those two stories are really interesting. “Jamie's Birth Story” begins eight days before Jamie’s actual birth and keeps going for two days into her life; it sorts of trails in and later trails off in the midst of a life, with an author who’s clearly aware that the beginning and ending of this story are absolutely arbitrary. Though she marks time through much of the story, the author abandons the clock after an increase in Pitocin brings her into a new sort of pain. She writes:

From here my memories are either very vivid or completely gone and my sense of time passing disappeared. So, this is more a list of the memories.... I dealt with the pain by acknowledging it, isolating it, and moving on to breathing. […] It was as though the only parts of my body that existed were my contraction and my diaphragm, everything else no longer existed.

Through her daughter’s birth, this author traces her own internal experiences alongside times and durations that she only learned afterward, presumably from her doctor and nurses, from the medical account in her chart.

“John Alexander's Birth Story” differs from Jamie’s in that it opens with an utterly conventional beginning: “It was July, it was hot, and I was a week late and miserable, I was convinced I would never have the baby. That night after weeks of going to bed early to be well rested for labor I decided since I was so restless I'd just stay up […]. At 11:30 or so I fell asleep, and at 11:48 I woke up with a big contraction.” Like Jamie’s mother, though, John Alexander’s departs from this absolutely conventional temporality when she describes a certain point of intensity in her labor by indicating temporal disorientation. She writes:

It seemed it hadn't been long at all, but at the same time I felt like I'd been in labor forever. [… T]he contractions picked up yet again—I could feel 3 distinct peaks, very strange. [… (T]hey told me later that the contractions at this point were 4-5 min[ute]s long—thank goodness no one told me then!) and I only had about a min[ute] in between. I had no sense of time during all of this, but I sensed that it was getting a little lighter in the room, dawn, and about that time I started to feel like I might be able to push, so I tried a few times, and OUCH!!

These two stories illustrate Beck’s findings beautifully. And yet they are—unavoidably—very far indeed from representative. The vast majority of the Labor of Love stories show us women who actively work to see clocks, complaining about broken or slow or fast or ill-positioned timepieces, and who recuperate their labor time into clock time and story time so completely that a reader only rarely glimpses cracks.

Indeed, the stories at The Labor of Love reconstruct the birthing experience within standard clock time and highly conventional narrative time far more vigorously than do many contemporary fictional pieces representing childbirth. We might expect, in keeping with common sense, that individuals’ informal birth stories should represent the internal experience of childbirth with greater truth and immediacy than do fictional accounts. Yet here we see hundreds of autobiographical online birth stories that, far from acknowledging any temporal dissonance, seem to work diligently to cover it up, to recuperate labor time into clock time and story time, to re-envision their own births as, essentially, episodes of A Baby Story. This retrospective resistance to novel temporal experiences—this firm loyalty to a powerfully simple and powerfully familiar narrative structure in the face of more complex and strange sensations, perceptions, and emotions—raises a host of important questions about gender, obstetrics, American media, online communication, the attribution of agency and power in contemporary birth practices, what we mean by 'true' in this context, and relationships amongst popular, ‘literary,’ and scientific discourses of childbirth—questions I'm considering more fully as I work on an article dealing with these stories and issues.

breastfeeding & feminism links

I'm working on a post dealing with my own take on breastfeeding in relation to feminism, and I ended up with so many links to include that I've decided they deserve a post of their own. I don't agree with everything these authors say, of course, but the pieces are thought-provoking and represent an interesting range of perspectives on both feminism and breastfeeding:

• Kate Joester's "Breastfeeding: Radical, Feminist and Good for You"
  
• "Feminist Mothers" and "Thanks for the Mammaries" at Spilt Milk
  
• Paige Hall Smith's "'Is it Just So My Right?': Women Repossessing Breastfeeding"
  
• Bernice L Hausman's "Women's Liberation and the Rhetoric of "Choice" in Infant Feeding Debates"
  
• Barbara Katz Rothman's "New Breast Milk in Old Bottles"
  
• Maxine Eichner's "Parenting and the Workplace: The Construction of Parenting Protections in United States Law"
  
• NOW's "Mothers Matter and Caregivers Count"
  
• Ruth Moss's "Sisters! Some of Us Are Mothers Too!"
• Hanna Rosin's Atlantic article "The Case against Breastfeeding"
  
• Peggy O'Mara's response in Mothering, entitled "Case Closed: Breast is Best"
  
• Feministing readers' comments on "The Case against Breastfeeding"
  

some favorite picture books

One of the many fun things about having a baby if you're a book lover and/or an art lover is that you get to buy and borrow all these wonderful children's books that have always been appealing to you but that you couldn't justify getting in the past. A lot of picture books offend the crap out of us; while racism is more or less gone from the ones that are still in print (with the rather significant exception of lots and lots of exclusion and the implicit normalization of white upper-middle-class experience), sexism is alive and well in mainstream children's literature. But there's so much amazing stuff, too, both old and new. Here's a very small and somewhat random but extremely high-quality smattering, in no particular order:

• Tree Ring Circus and Pssst! (Adam Rex)
• Knuffle Bunny, the Elephant and Piggie books, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, etc. (Mo Willems)
• The Big Book of Things That Go (DK Publishing)
• Eating the Alphabet: Fruits and Vegetables from A to Z (Lois Ehlert)
• Jack's Garden (Henry Cole)
• The Snowy Day (Ezra Jack Keats)
• Horton Hears a Who, The Lorax, and Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? (Dr. Seuss)
• Penguin Dreams (Vivian Walsh & J. Otto Seibold)
• The Octonauts and the Only Lonely Monster (Meomi)
• My Puppy Is Born (Joanna Cole)
• Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak)
• Bruno Munari's Zoo and ABC (soooo beautiful)
• Not a Box (Antoinette Portis)
• There's a Monster at the End of this Book (Jon Stone & Michael Stollin)

What are your favorites?