The milk of human kindness?

Kate Middleton’s breasts are not the only ones being pawed over in the media at the moment: mothers are copping it too.  

Breastfeeding appears to be the latest beat-up of mothers in the media. Hardly a day goes past, it seems, without some story or other about mothers and what they do with their breasts. Some cite mothers who sing the praises of breastfeeding, others tell of the stories of mothers were made to feel bad for not being able to breastfeed. Some articles push the ‘breast is best’ message, while others opine that sometimes breast is not best after all and most mothers don't even met their own breastfeeding goals. Some articles even carry opinion polls: did you breastfeed and are bottle-feeding mothers vilified? As if they are a disinterested party, newspapers also observe that the breastfeeding debate has 'gone sour'.

Of course, there’s those celebrity breasts too: Jessica Simpson is apparently addicted to breastfeeding while others proudly and publicly trumpet their plans to do it . Even Posh Spice, fourth time round, breastfed, describing it as ‘heaven’. 

And, a few months ago, the media struck gold: a seismic backlash and counter-backlash over an anti-smoking advertisement (which was not actually about breastfeeding at all) featuring a celebrity father who was bottle-feeding his young child. The furore over this one seemed to leave everyone reeling: bottle-feeding mothers, breastfeeding mothers, breastfeeding advocates, and fathers who wanted to be involved in the care of their babies. 

This explosion of stories about breastfeeding seems to me less about what is best for children (and way way less about what is best for women), and more about divide-and-rule - just like it is with artificial divisions created between stay-at-home-mothers and working mothers. The reality is that many women both breastfeed and bottle-feed:  one mother I know principally breastfed her children, but, as a full-time working mother, also supplemented with formula. Other mothers I know who were unable to continue breastfeeding, persevered for several weeks to try and give their babies the benefits of breastmilk, then switched to formula, so their babies didn’t, y’know, starve. Others breastfed for several months, but switched to formula before the magical 12-month mark either because they just couldn’t take it any more or their doctor advised stopping breastfeeding for the sake of their own health. Some women also formula-feed from birth, while others exclusively breastfeed and continue breastfeeding until their children choose to self-wean. Breastfeeding, like so much else when it comes to mothering, is a spectrum not a monolith.

Society remains deeply conflicted about women’s breasts. While public health officials, following the guidelines of the World Health Organisation, push exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months as the ideal, ‘the public’ are reportedly and repeatedly squeamish at the sight of a woman baring her breasts in public and latching a baby or young child on to them. Images, such as that on a recent Time cover of a woman breastfeeding her toddler, which generated a great deal of comment and controversy, are considered beyond the pale. 

Mothers therefore seem to be getting some pretty mixed messages about breast-feeding: do it at all costs to the exclusion of everything else but don’t even think about continuing past about eighteen months because that’s just plain weird.

Hmmm ... okay. 

Meanwhile, the actual women on the other end of those much-handled breasts are given pretty short shrift. Some report being made to feel like bad mothers if, for whatever reason, they can’t or won’t breastfeed. While others who want to breastfeed their children for as long as the children want it are labelled as freaks and even child-molesters. Those who advocate breastfeeding and want to support mothers establish feeding, are frustrated by extreme depictions of their work (some advocates are even described using references to Nazism and Islamist fundamentalism. I mean, really? Just because they think breastfeeding is best and want to try and help women feed their babies?) 

Yet another example of women caught in an impossible and contradictory double-bind that means all women fail situation. How unusual.

I have to say, even some feminists are uncertain about what it all means, and have debated whether breastfeeding is feminist or not. Some consider that it is, while others confess a deep ambivalence, and still others contend that formula-feeding has been an important development in freeing women from biological servitude (though if you want to breastfeed that’s okay too). My own feeling is that this is entirely the wrong question to be asking. Breastfeeding in itself is neither feminist nor unfeminist: supporting women to make the best choices they can for themselves and their families in the circumstances in which they find themselves is.

I personally breastfed for a just over a year, and have never used formula. But here’s what I had going for me in order to make that ‘choice’: 

• the physical ability to do so
• a baby who seemed to know how to latch on properly herself (and not all of them do)
• no severe side-effects such as cracked nipples or mastitis
• no other disability or illness that would affect my ability to breastfeed
• a baby with a good appetite who took to solid food well, meaning that breastfeeding became much less time-consuming after about 8-9 months
• a supportive husband, who got the baby up for every feed during the night, and, recognising the toll it took both physically and emotionally, stepped up and took on other domestic jobs
• a decently-paid job from which I could choose to either take a long period of parental leave in order to focus on the baby or return to work and have breastfeeding breaks, privacy to breast feed and/or pump milk.

All that support notwithstanding, I’m not sure I would share Victoria Beckham’s view that it was ‘heaven’.  Here’s how I felt about it: 

• pleased I could do it, especially after a difficult birth that didn’t go at all the way I thought it would
• bored at being stuck in one place while the baby fed for up to 90 minutes at a time 
• resentful at being the only one who could do it
• worried that the baby wouldn’t gain enough weight (health authorities might push you to breastfeed but with their obsession with weighing them, particularly in the early days, it can send a message that breastfeeding isn't very reliable)
• a sense of duty and obligation that if I could do it I should

These are probably not the noblest reasons for breastfeeding, but I’d be lying if I said that I loved it every single minute of every single day. And I think the media and wider culture does all mothers a disservice to perpetuate sentimental and misleading ideals about breastfeeding. I don’t see how it will encourage more mothers to breastfeed if there is not also some honesty about what it takes to do it: time and a lot of patience, support (from partners, families, health workers, and the wider community), understanding, societal structures and practices that can accommodate it, a little bit of luck, and, yes, knowing there is a formula tin available if it is needed.  

Guess that just doesn't make for an attention-grabbing story though, does it?

review: The Mommy Myth

‘Did you see the news?’

‘I saw it in a magazine ....’

‘This week on Myths and Lies about Motherhood ...’

The media comes in for a fair amount of beat-up about everything these days. And not without cause, as the Levenson Inquiry, for example, is daily demonstrating. But the dodgy aspects of the media are not just about phone-tapping and hacking, shoddy journalistic ethics and corporate greed. Regardless of how sophisticated our critique of it may be, or how cynical our reading is, mass media - in the form of news media, TV shows, advertising, movies, magazines - plays a critical role in what we think about, even if, we tell ourselves, it doesn’t tell us how to think about it. It sets the agenda, and both politicians and the public take note.

Psychologist Susan J Douglas and philosopher Meredith W Michaels - respectively, a mother-of-one and a mother-of-five - wrote the The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined Women (2004) in order to analyse and critique the role of the mass media in ‘promulgating and exaggerating’ myths about motherhood. In the US, Douglas and Michaels argue that the mass media’s representations of motherhood ‘have laid down a thick, sedimented layer of guilt, fear, and anxiety as well as in increasingly powerful urge to talk back’. (p 13) Since the 1970s, and reaching a peak in the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s, media constructions of motherhood have raised the bar ‘year by year, of the standards of good mothering while singling out and condemning those we are supposed to see as dreadful mothers.’ (p13)

While rigourously and systematically tracing the evolution of media constructions of motherhood since 1970, Douglas and Michaels also remind us what second-wave feminists actually had to say about motherhood (as opposed to right-wing distortions of it) and the ways which public policies on childcare, welfare and community funding have been eroded to the point of non-existence since the introduction of Reaganomics (detailed in a chapter pithily titled ‘Dumb Men, Stupid Choices’). Coupled with dwindling political will and a strengthening backlash against feminism (we’re all post-feminists now, right?), the growth of the ‘new momism’ has served to:

contain and, where possible, eradicate, all of the societal changes brought on by feminism. It is backlash in its most refined, pernicious form because it insinuates itself into women’s psyches just where we have been rendered most vulnerable: in our love for our kids. The new momism, then is deeply and powerfully political. The new momism is the result of the combustible intermixing of right-wing attacks on feminism and women, the media’s increasingly fine-tuned and incessant target marketing of mothers and children, the collapse of government institutions - public schools, child welfare programs - that served families in the past ... and mothers’ own very real desires to do the best job possible raising their kids in a culture that praises mothers in rhetoric and reviles them in public policy (pp 23-4)

The mountain of evidence to support their argument is compelling. From little news focus on motherhood in the 1970s to the ascension of the celebrity mother and demonisation of the crack-addicted welfare mother in the 1980s, Douglas and Michaels piece together an overwhelmingly stifling media onslaught of images of perfect, intensive mothering working in tandem with cautionary tales of ‘mothers-gone-bad’ who were poor and nearly always black and living in the inner-city (in contrast to statistics which actually showed that most poor mothers were white and lived in hard-to-reach rural areas). It is easy to marvel from the lofty heights of 2012 at how cynical, self-serving, and mean-spirited the removal of government funding for welfare and childcare programmes was (Nixon, for example, first in a long line of presidents to veto a government-funded childcare programme, used his discretionary veto power to torpedo this bill so he could count on support in some wavering corners when he sought re-election). Easy, that is, until we read contemporary news-stories about politicians telling single mothers to get back to work, and tinkering with funding for early-childhood education. Conservative, patriarchal ideas disseminated by politicians and the media have come to seem natural, like common sense.

While Douglas and Michaels show how the dominant media image of mothering has become one of intensive, upper-middle-class, corporately-defined individualism, they also show that representations of rebellious mothers have similarly gained attention. For every soft-focus magazine exclusive with Christie Brinkley or Marie Osmond, there is a Roseanne, or a Peg Bundy, or a Brett Butler, to mouth off at the new momism. Douglas and Michaels position themselves more squarely on the side of the Roseannes of the world, but also stress that she is a construction too: the binary opposite of the angelic mother who delights in every nano-second she spends with her children. Their mode of address throughout the book gives away their preference: they wisecrack, open chapters with cynical depictions of family life (think Married with Children rather than The Waltons), and undercut their more serious scholarship with sarcastic asides. Ordinarily, I’m all for this kind of thing, but, having just stated Shari L. Thurer’s book The Myths of Motherhood - if books about motherhood are not truth-telling, they’re myth-busting! - in which she deploys the same mode of address it’s hard not to read it as a self-deprecating defence mechanism i.e. you can’t criticise me more anymore than I am already criticising myself.

Historian and critical theorist Michel Foucault described power as not simply repressive, but also creative. Exploring the way in which sexuality, specifically homosexuality, was established as an identity rather than an act in nineteenth-century discourses of power, he argued that what began as an identification and a term of abuse, could be reclaimed as a subject position from which to speak (i.e. ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’) Similarly, repressive (and regressive) constructions of the new mother, create a corollary, the rebellious mother, the one who talks back and reclaims the right to determine what motherhood should be, both for herself and other mothers. Viewed in this way, Douglas and Michaels project is unashamedly political: it is not meant to be a dispassionate, ‘balanced’ and ‘objective’ account of the media in the last four decades. Rather, it is a call to arms: don’t let them define and pigeon-hole you! don’t let them put all the responsibility for growing healthy, well-rounded children on you (remember, it takes a village to raise a child)! and, most importantly, don’t watch Meg Ryan movies! Actually, I just slipped that last one in there.

It all sounds a bit ‘70s, doesn’t it?

Which is no bad thing, as Douglas and Michaels remind us. Most women inspired into activism by second-wave feminism were mothers. Mothers who demanded better treatment for themselves and their children, better childcare options, better support from the government for their families, better relationships with their partners, better pay and better career opportunities. And, here’s the other big secret that they say the media won’t tell you about feminism ‘exposing patriarchy was, while certainly dangerous, also - let’s face it - a blast!’ (p 38)

And, as novelist Linda Grant has recently reminded us, there are still a thousand reasons why this important work needs to continue.