Breastfeeding in American Women’s Literature

Latching On

Wendy Whelan-Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032722191
• eBook ISBN: 9781040132623
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

Rather than rarities, literary depictions of women breastfeeding infants are more common in American literature than recognized. In some cases, readers have dismissed such portrayals as scenic background or strokes of verisimilitude. In other cases, we have failed to register them at all. By cataloging and closely reading scenes of characters breastfeeding across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, this book decodes the beliefs of writers as celebrated as Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich and as current as Camille Dungy, Maggie Nelson, and Torrey Peters. It traces in these authors' fantasies and fears the consistent and sometimes competing cultural ideologies that accrue over decades and find expression in breastfeeding scenes. Despite the different historical and cultural expectations of what a mother should be and do, twentieth and twenty-first-century women writers have consistently singled out maternal pleasure—a mother's privileging of her own desire—as the most important theme attending scenes of breastfeeding.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Caroline Kirkland’s Pioneer Women and the Busy Breast
• 2 Breastfeeding as Good Husbandry in Willa Cather’s Fiction
• 3 Women’s Utopias and the Problem of Breastfeeding
• 4 The Passions of Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich’s Breastfeeding Mothers1
• 5 Nursing an Eco-Maternal Ethics: Maggie Nelson and Camille Dungy1
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index