more on breastfeeding, feminism, cost, and value

A recent anonymous commenter on my post "Breastfeeding, Sexism, and Feminism" wrote:

I appreciate the balanced and compassionate approach you took to such a divisive issue. You have no idea how wigged out some people got about this.

One question that I have is if you considered your time as a part of the cost of breastfeeding? Formula is much cheaper if one considers the mother's time worth even minimum wage. We all know that breastfeeding is far more time-consuming and isolating than is bottle-feeding. Exclusive breastfeeding is a full-time job, and makes an ounce of breastmilk, according to some economists, about $1.33 per ounce.

Another question I have is if you considered the societal consequences of the push to exclusively breastfeed for six months? The result is that the mother almost inevitably has to place herself at the economic mercy of her spouse by terminating employment or committing a form of career suicide. Further, because we sideline our best and brightest, women are not making reasonable strides in gaining positions of power. We are still a tiny minority in legislative and executive branches of government and we are still only hold 12 CEO spots out of the fortune 500 companies. Think about all the billions of dollars, of all the corporate greed indulged in by drug and healthcare companies - and we have a say in none of that because we are home breastfeeding.

I agree with you that breastfeeding is not anti-feminist – far from it. And I agree with you even more, that instead it is our system that is anti-feminist. My final question is can we change the system while breastfeeding? The answer, regrettably, is a qualified no. For those women who have careers that will not suffer from spending six hours a day for six months in isolation, and for those who do not feel uncomfortable or experience severe pain – we should offer them our wholehearted encouragement. But for those of us who are battling for tenure or who are trying to make a crack in the glass ceiling, we must do what is best for our children – all of our children. We must understand that children thrive best (and this is borne out statistically) in societies and in families where there is gender–equality. In fact, gender equality is the chief predictor of a nation’s infant mortality. So, until we have enough power to insure our children, to keep the sovereignty of our bodies inviolable, we cannot afford to give the “enemy” (corporate, capitalist patriarchy – not men) so much as an inch. I believe that we should fight for our rights; we should work to make our nation one of gender equality, so that our daughters or granddaughters can chose to breastfeed or to bottle-feed without incurring economic risk and do so in public – without shame. We are 31 in the world in gender equality – behind South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Lithuania. I am confident that if we change that, increased breastfeeding will be just one of the ways in which our children will benefit.

For the record, btw, I breastfed exclusively and despite extreme pain and isolate for six months.

I appreciate how thoughtful your blog is, and I hope that this contributes to your thought process. It certainly is not offered in any way as criticism.

Thanks for the long, thoughtful comment. I'd like to make a few points in response, though of course I should start by saying we seem to agree in spirit: breastfeeding is ill-supported within our social structure and thus--because of this context--can involve unreasonable and deeply damaging demands on women. The ONLY reason long-term breastfeeding harms women's careers is because the structure of the US business and legal systems is sexist and (in many ways beyond this one) destructive of wellness and full human experience.

The question of cost and time matters in two different ways, I think:

1. It makes sense to account for the financial value of a breastfeeding mother's time (which we can think of as productive and valid labor, of course, without implying that breastfeeding doesn't also involve love and pleasure--I love my students and take great pleasure in teaching and reading, but that doesn't mean it's not 'work' or lacks economic value).
2. The practical implications of this value/cost vary from individual to individual and from family to family. In the original post, I wrote that "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." On a practical level (not on the more philosophical or perhaps political/ethical level of value vs. taking-for-granted), I mean "cheapest" in that sentence to mean "easiest on my individual family's budget." I took zero leave time and continued teaching my normal load throughout our breastfeeding relationship, so breastfeeding cost me no money despite the value of my time. My partner and I decided we were financially able to have a child (which we very much wanted to do) in part because I would breastfeed, we used cloth diapers, we were able to continue working and doing research in a two-shift system that involved extremely little additional childcare, and so forth. So, while I put in a lot of extra hours breastfeeding--just as my partner put in a lot of extra hours changing and washing diapers, cooking nearly all rather than his usual half of our meals, etc., etc.-- I was still able to maintain my normal salary. (What suffered? Why, sleep, of course. But you've been there.)

Both these issues seem important to me and can be discussed without implying that the other is secondary or unimportant. I probably didn't speak enough to the first issue in my original post.

The point in this comment that concerns me, though, is the implication that breastfeeding must be "isolating." Part of this is personal experience--I simply breastfed wherever I happened to be: walking around the grocery with the baby in a sling, while I ran meetings when he was little, on campus during breaks between professional obligations, at friends' birthday parties, at restaurants, with my family, with my partner, with whomever, wherever. So I never found breastfeeding isolating or in any way a tether to my home. I certainly didn't "spend [...] six hours a day for six months in isolation" (let alone discomfort or pain). But the larger point is that there is absolutely no reason for "exclusive breastfeeding" to equal being "at home breastfeeding," trapped in the domestic space and excluded from political and economic agency.

In other words, I think it's extraordinarily important to realize--and act politically on the basis of the fact--that breastfeeding doesn't cause isolation, career loss, lack of access to political or economic power, or indeed ongoing physical pain. Instead, larger and alterable cultural realities--a lack of appropriate practical and social support for breastfeeding, a lack of genuine free choice with regard to infant feeding method, insane emotional and practical pressures on mothers, a sexist and classist culture, and inadequate family leave, childcare, etc.--cause those problems for many, many women. As I say in the original post: "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."