The Great Breast-Feeding Question

Abstract

Although breast-feeding is a uniquely female activity, and all literature and practices concerned with infant feeding are by definition about women, it has held little interest for feminists. This lack of apparent concern with breast-feeding is in marked contrast with extensive feminist attention to other areas of women’s health and reproduction. Indeed one might have expected that Oakley’s pathbreaking study of childbirth (Oakley, 1980) would have triggered interest in the closely related area of lactation but this has not been the case. With very few exceptions (e.g. Maher, 1992; Oakley, 1993; Dyball, 1992) feminist energy in relation to the politics of breast-feeding has provided little challenge to the mainstream pre-occupation: how to get more women to breastfeed for longer (Van Esterik, 1989; Palmer, 1988, 1993). The problem of declining breast-feeding rates has been almost universally seen as an assault by baby milk manufacturers on women’s natural capacities. Feminists have not been sufficiently alert to what is being said about women in the avalanche of writing and talking about breast-feeding. Nor have we considered breast-feeding in the contexts of gendered relations in widely differing social contexts