Back to the Breast

Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America

Jessica Martucci

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226288031
• eBook ISBN: 9780226288178
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

After decades of decline during the twentieth century, breastfeeding rates began to rise again in the 1970s, a rebound that has continued to the present. While it would be easy to see this reemergence as simply part of the naturalism movement of the '70s, Jessica Martucci reveals here that the true story is more complicated. Despite the widespread acceptance and even advocacy of formula feeding by many in the medical establishment throughout the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, a small but vocal minority of mothers, drawing upon emerging scientific and cultural ideas about maternal instinct, infant development, and connections between the body and mind, pushed back against both hospital policies and cultural norms by breastfeeding their children. As Martucci shows, their choices helped ideologically root a "back to the breast" movement within segments of the middle-class, college-educated population as early as the 1950s.
           
That movement—in which the personal and political were inextricably linked—effectively challenged midcentury norms of sexuality, gender, and consumption, and articulated early environmental concerns about chemical and nuclear contamination of foods, bodies, and breast milk. In its groundbreaking chronicle of the breastfeeding movement, Back to the Breast provides a welcome and vital account of what it has meant, and what it means today, to breastfeed in modern America.

CHAPTER ONE

Make Room for Mother

The “Psy”-entific Ideology of Natural Motherhood

In 1928, psychologist John B. Watson launched what would become one of the best-selling child care advice manuals of the twentieth century, inscribed with its now well-known dedication to “the first mother who brings up a happy child.”1 Watson’s sarcasm reflected the era’s vitriolic skepticism of nonprofessional female expertise. By the late 1920s mothers who resisted the march of scientific progress by following the advice of grandmothers and “old wives’ tales” were at best mocked as ignorant and at worst considered threats to the very survival of their children, and even civilization. Less than two decades later, a different kind of advice manual was slowly making its way into the hands of American mothers. In 1944, Childbirth without Fear: The Principles and Practice of Natural Childbirth, began attracting a small but avid following in the United States. The British author and obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read assured his readers that the female body was inherently capable of birthing a baby and that the pain, fear, and danger that accompanied modern childbirth resulted from the psychological conditioning society imposed on women. The difference in their messages is stark: in Watson’s eyes mothers were clueless dangers to their children without the competent guidance of a scientific expert, while Read’s philosophy suggested that women were naturally mothers. By the 1940s, Read was just one of a growing international network of scientific experts who believed that the main obstacle women faced in becoming successful mothers was the intervention of modern scientific society itself.2

This chapter explores how the midcentury human and biological sciences helped construct a modern ideology of natural motherhood through the study of mother-infant interactions across boundaries of difference, including human/animal distinctions, disciplinary and national borders, and cultures. An international body of scientific and clinical work laid the foundation for natural motherhood between the 1920s and 1950s. While the ideology of scientific motherhood, which had helped fuel the rise of scientific formula and bottle-feeding, remained a dominant force in American motherhood throughout this period, it also helped provoke a backlash in science and culture that stressed the importance of emotion and maternal love in child rearing.3 By the 1940s the earliest of these works was already shaping a popular movement in support of natural motherhood in both childbirth and breastfeeding practices. Throughout my discussion of these scientists, I draw on the apt terminology of Nikolas Rose whose concept of the “psy”-ences captures the indefinite boundaries that continued to characterize the mid-twentieth-century fields of psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and even ethology, the science of animal behavior.4 These experts contributed to the construction of a uniquely modern and scientific ideology of natural motherhood. In doing so, they helped redefine the meaning of breastfeeding for mothers in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Psy-ence of Natural Motherhood

At its most basic, the ideology of natural motherhood refers to a body of scientific models, theories, and teleological assumptions as well as widespread cultural beliefs that natural instincts of both an emotional and a physical nature govern maternal behavior and infant development. As complex as this definition can become when all of its various components are explored, its distillation yields a simple and very real point of difference between the competing ideologies of natural and scientific motherhood: natural motherhood relies upon a model of embodied maternal knowledge while scientific motherhood relies on the external knowledge and technologies of scientific experts. How a mother accesses this knowledge is a question that has evoked different answers depending on time and circumstance, but the concept of an embodied source of wisdom in infant rearing offered a dramatic departure from the model of knowledge transmission in scientific motherhood.

The pages that follow explore the shift in the psy-ences toward a central concern with the psychological and emotional influence of the mother on her child. Beginning with Watson in the United States and extending to the legacy of Sigmund Freud through the work of his daughter, Anna Freud, and her disciplinary rival, Melanie Klein, I explore how psychologists and psychoanalysts thought and wrote about mother-infant relationships, paying particular attention to breastfeeding. I then trace the impact of the work of the British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby, whose interest in breaking out of the early twentieth-century psychoanalytic debate over infant feeding drove him to explore the work of ethologists and experimental psychologists. While Bowlby and others in his camp, including psychologist Harry Harlow, worked to disconnect infant psychology from the subject of feeding by identifying a more powerful and ultimately more primal internal drive than physical hunger, the work of these men in articulating “love” as an instinctual physical and psychological need ironically provided the foundation for a scientific argument in favor of breastfeeding. In the final section of this chapter, I discuss the lives and work of two highly influential female psy-entists who helped translate this work through both their own lives as women and mothers, and as experts. Throughout the World War II and postwar eras, anthropologist Margaret Mead and her student, psychologist Niles Newton, helped shape the work of male psy-entists like Bowlby into a maternal-centric ideology of natural motherhood in which breastfeeding symbolized a powerful and autonomous female identity based on embodied natural instincts and a belief in universal womanhood.

The Psychology of Mothering

John B. Watson’s work helped fundamentally shape the role of American psychology in the study of infant rearing and motherhood. His 1928 best-selling child care advice manual Psychological Care of Infant and Child integrated his theories of Behaviorism seamlessly into the day-to-day care of a child, stating simply that “since children are made not born, failure to bring up a happy child, a well adjusted child—assuming bodily health—falls upon the parents’ shoulders.”5 Watson’s assertion that “no one today knows enough to raise a child” spoke directly to the early twentieth century’s scientific motherhood. This powerful ideology held women responsible for child rearing but also required that they seek “expert advice in order to perform their duties successfully.”6

Watson’s work, perhaps ironically, foreshadowed a change in perspective in mother-infant study that would challenge the hegemony of scientific motherhood. In Psychological Care, Watson articulated the ideal of the professional mother, a model of womanhood in which mothers deferred to male scientific authority on domestic matters but also devoted themselves fully to the job of rearing children, scientifically. Men like Watson wrote passionately about the shortcomings of American mothers with the hopes of guiding women to accept the superiority of scientific knowledge in the maternal sphere and to eschew the coddling of the Victorian matriarch. With well-practiced condescension, Watson berated American mothers for their ignorance and denounced the role of “nature” in mothering. For most mothers, he wrote, “the age-old belief that all that children need is food as often as they call for it, warm clothes and a roof over their heads at night, is enough.” “‘Nature,’” he wrote mockingly, “does the rest almost unaided.”7 In Watson’s eyes, and in the eyes of many of his peers, “nature” was not a guide but an enemy, an ideological holdover from the sentimentalist arguments of the Victorian era when most believed women were inherently gifted with the ability to raise children. This view of motherhood notably highlighted the lack of psychological awareness that unscientific mothers possessed. Such backward women, Watson mocked, continued to believe that feeding was the most important part of raising an infant while they neglected their children’s psyche and emotional health.

While Watson argued for the expansion of scientific motherhood to include psychology among the more established areas of hygiene, nutrition, and regimen, he also set the science of motherhood on a new path. By the 1920s, Watson’s work had helped popularize the idea that in addition to overseeing basic physical care, mothers needed to raise mentally and emotionally fit children in order to adequately fulfill their roles. While historians have highlighted the extent to which this contributed to the creation of unrealistic and harmful expectations of modern mothers, Watson’s acknowledgment of the importance of emotions in child rearing had other unintended consequences as well.8 Despite the behaviorists’ disbelief in human instinct and the idea of “nature,” the idea that feelings were an important part of child rearing necessarily introduced the subjective and the experiential into the developing science of motherhood. This would go on to create the possibility for a new brand of maternal expertise altogether, based on a new kind of psy-ence that took “female” ways of knowing seriously again. Even as mothers came under increasing surveillance by the psy-ences as the century wore on, therefore, they also gained access to a set of arguments and explanations that supported a new model of maternal authority.

As psy-entists scrutinized the emotional fitness of mothers, their gaze also appropriately shifted to the psychology of infancy. In 1938, Dr. C. Anderson Aldrich, an associate professor at Northwestern University Medical School and pediatric clinician (and later, the mentor of Dr. Benjamin Spock), publicized a new way of thinking about infancy. His influential book, Babies Are Human Beings: An Interpretation of Growth, laid out in layman’s terms an evolutionary model of infant growth and development that integrated biological theories of childhood growth with mental development. His rhetoric throughout emphasized that “nature,” in fact, played an important role in the raising of an infant. Aldrich’s work drew direct links between infant feeding and a concept of “natural” development in human babies. He suggested that infants innately know to cry out when hungry; therefore, it made sense that “in order to help this pain-food-relief sequence which makes eating pleasant, we supply food when we hear the hunger cry.” He also noted that the infants’ pleasure in eating could only be enhanced by ensuring that “the surroundings of his early meals are made as comfortable as possible.” Luckily for humans, he added, “Nature provides an ideal set-up for this when she arranges that he is cuddled and warmed by his mother while nursing.”9 Unlike the earlier claims of the behaviorists, Aldrich helped articulate an argument for a biological-psychological system of feedback that linked infant and maternal behavior into a harmonious rhythm, choreographed by nature. In Aldrich’s view, nature and nurture worked in concert, giving purpose and meaning to maternal-infant interactions, particularly feeding.

The work of Dr. Margaret Ribble, who spent four years studying in Vienna with Anna Freud, also contributed to a growing canon that emphasized early mother-infant interactions as foundational for psychological and emotional development in both the infant and the mother. Ribble’s work stressed the importance of infancy as a period of critical psychological development that depended almost exclusively on “woman’s instinctual nature.”10 In her 1943 popular crossover work, The Rights of Infants, Ribble critiqued mainstream psychological perspectives on mother-infant dynamics in favor of one that embraced the emotional and instinctual aspects of mothering more directly.11 She wrote, “Modern science, when it considers the matter, assumes that this basic tie [between mother and infant] exists in order that the child may be fed and protected from harm during its helpless infancy.” For Ribble, this theoretical platform diminished the role of the mother, turning her into nothing more than “a trustworthy nurse, who can arbitrarily be replaced.” She called for a more complete consideration of “the matter of a personal relationship” between mother and infant, one “on which the child’s future emotional and social reactions are based.12

Ribble’s work also assured women that they could learn “both by instinct and observation” how to care for their babies and argued “that [‘mothering’] is as vital to a child’s development as food.”13 In her lengthy discussion of breastfeeding, Ribble declared that it was “of the very essence of ‘mothering’ and the most important means of immunizing a baby against anxiety.” She emphasized, furthermore, that when it came to infant feeding it was best to “follow Nature’s cue,” because in “normal breast feeding” (which, she added, should continue “at least until the teething period”), “the various instinctual hungers are self regulated.”14 These “instinctual hungers” were best met, she articulated again, and again, through the mother’s natural ability to breastfeed. She went on to emphasize: “Breast-fed babies tend to have more trust and confidence in their mothers.”15

In her writings, Ribble not only focused on the importance of a successful breastfeeding relationship; she also highlighted the period immediately following birth as a crucial time in the infant’s psychological development. A 1945 Parents’ Magazine article about Ribble’s work explained to its readers that “breast feeding is . . . an important part of mothering, giving as it does the first opportunity for cultivating the child’s emotional capacities.” “Every time you cuddle your baby in your arms and release your milk for his nourishment,” the author added, “you add to his sense of well-being and security.”16 In the early 1940s, Ribble sat at the forefront of a psy-entific paradigm that would increasingly emphasize the crucial importance of the physical and emotional circumstances of the immediate postpartum period for long-term psychological development.

The works of Ribble and Aldrich, which identified the existence of a complex mental life in the infant from birth, represented views that became increasingly common among psy-entists throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s. That psy-entists considered the mental state of the infant at all was a divergence from an earlier school of thought notably championed by Rousseau, which held that little mental development occurred prior to the “age of reason,” around seven or eight years old.17 Sigmund Freud’s work on Oedipal experiences and sexual pleasure drives played an integral part in this eventual shift to a concern about the early inner life of infants. For example, a widely cited article published by analyst David Levy in a 1928 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry explored the contentious issue of finger sucking through a Freudian framework, suggesting ultimately that it occurred as the result of problematic “feeding methods.”18 In a series of twenty case study investigations, Levy explored finger sucking and “masturbation” in toddler-aged children, tracing each of their so-called pathologies to the method of their early feedings at their mothers’ breasts. In one case he observed that an exclusively breastfed baby girl was, on the first feeding, “pulled away from the breast and was [thereafter] never allowed to nurse 15 minutes.”19 According to Levy, this resulted in an unsatisfied pleasure drive, causing the child to pathologically suck her thumb as a toddler.

The work of Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, helped to further the shift in psychoanalytic interest to the early period of infancy. Anna Freud helped contribute to the understanding of a developmental arc in the mental life of an infant that was entirely dependent upon a close relationship with his or her mother. Her work in wartime nurseries during World War II showed that even brief periods of separation between infants and their mothers at key developmental stages could have long-lasting mental and physical effects on child development. In her exploration of infant and child psychology, Freud turned to infant feeding behaviors as a tool of inquiry. The results of her 1946 Feeding Behavior Study further bolstered the psychoanalytic view of the importance of feeding experiences for long-term infant development.20 A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Breastfeeding?
• CHAPTER 1. Make Room for Mother: The “Psy”-entific Ideology of Natural Motherhood
• CHAPTER 2. Frustration and Failure: The Scientific Management of Breastfeeding
• CHAPTER 3. “Motherhood Raised to the nth Degree”: Breastfeeding in the Postwar Years
• CHAPTER 4. Maternal Expectations: New Mothers, Nurses, and Breastfeeding
• CHAPTER 5. Our Bodies, Our Nature: Breastfeeding, the Environment, and Feminism
• CHAPTER 6. Woman’s Right, Mother’s Milk: The Nature and Technology of Breast Milk Feeding
• EPILOGUE. Natural Motherhood Redux
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index