This week’s New Yorker runs a natural history of breastfeeding well worth reading in its entirety, even if you’ve never exchanged business cards with another nursing mom while both of you were hooked up to breast pump tubing during a work conference “break.”
Some fascinating trivia from the Age of Reason:
…wet nurses were not nearly as common in Colonial America as they were in eighteenth-century Europe. “Suckle your Infant your Self if you can,” Cotton Mather commanded from the pulpit. Puritans found milk divine: even the Good Book gave suck. “Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, Drawn Out of the Breasts of Both Testaments” was the title of a popular catechism. By the end of the eighteenth century, breast-feeding had come to seem an act of citizenship. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792), scoffed that a mother who “neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen.” The following year, the French National Convention ruled that women who employed wet nurses could not apply for state aid; not long afterward, Prussia made breast-feeding a legal requirement.
Kate Harding over at Salon’s Broadsheet found the article’s takeaways a bit disturbing; you might too. I was too besotted by the bright, shiny historical details to pay close attention to the mommy war ammo.
I’m looking forward to reading Jill Lepore’s book on the broader topic, whenever she publishes it. Write faster, Lepore!
