The New Yorker has an article on the history of nursing and pumping.
It was quite timely that somone pointed me to this story, given the identity crisis that I have been wallowing in for the past couple of years. The article itself, I love and hate. Mostly the latter.
Pumping is no fun—whether it’s more boring or more lonesome I find hard to say—but it has recently become so common that even some women who are home with their babies all day long express their milk and feed it in a bottle. Behind closed doors, the nation begins to look like a giant human dairy farm.
I think that to suggest that we breastfeeding moms spend our day pumping so that we can then spend our days feeding from a bottle is pretty misleading. I don’t know anyone, not a single mom out of all of the 50+ breastfeeding moms that I know right now, who does this. In fact, most of the women that I know (and by saying “most”, I am being generous because I really should say “all”) hate pumping, dread pumping, and do it only because they really believe that the sacrifice is worth it for their babies.
The history in the article is spotty and I will just leave it at that. I don’t have a university library in front of me, but I wrote enough papers on the history of motherhood and women’s sexuality and reproduction to know when someone is stretching the truth to suit the slant of their article. But… it’s the New Yorker, not a history journal and it’s 5 pages, not 50. So, moving on to the stuff I did like…
Non-bathroom lactation rooms are such a paltry substitute for maternity leave, you might think that the craze for pumps—especially pressing them on poor women while giving tax breaks to big businesses—would be met with skepticism in some quarters. Not so. The National Organization for Women wants more pumps at work: NOW’s president, Kim Gandy, complains that “only one-third of mega-corporations provide a safe and private location for women to pump breast milk for their babies.” (When did “women’s rights” turn into “the right to work”?)
Ah-ha! Were we not just discussing this?
She could have mentioned the melamine-tainted formula or the research suggesting that we now have too much (non-organic, genetically-modified, highly-processed) soy in our diet, starting with soy formula, when discussing why some mothers might choose to take pumping breaks instead of coming home early. And she might have not assumed that an employer would let a mother leave early even if chose to forgo the breaks altogether. And she might not have made pumps sound like such chic accessories that we are all just dying to tote around a la Will Ferrell. Okay. I guess I just like that one point she made, after all.
January 17, 2009 at 2:35 am
But it was a very *good* point! The assumption that equality means we all want a career gets right up my nose.
January 17, 2009 at 10:23 am
Yes, it was a good point but overall, it was overly critical of mothers and not critical enough of the system. And when it criticizes the system, it blames the mothers for not doing the same. And THAT is totally unfair. Mothers are forever lamenting shitty maternity leave in this country! How many women are in tears having to take their babies to day care after a measly 6 weeks???
Traditionally for men, freedom has included “freedom from the home.” So your point about the masters tools is well-taken.
January 17, 2009 at 8:21 am
You know, I bought the mag entirely because of that article and then couldn’t get past the first page. I think the breast pump is a necessary evil for most women (and I was incredibly thankful for mine when I was relactating, mind.) Breast pump as symbol of freedom? Not so much. Or, should I say, the same old patriarchal sort of ‘freedom’ we should be questioning.
It’s sad to me how few people remember Audre Lord’s warning about using master’s tools to tear down master’s house.
January 18, 2009 at 5:01 am
Sorry, I didn’t mean to belittle the wrongness of the rest of the article.
I still have a great deal of difficulty getting my head around the insanity that is US maternity leave. I can’t even begin to imagine going back to work at 6 weeks, and I didn’t particularly enjoy my kids when they were tiny.
Corporate America looks, from where I stand, as an unassailable force. I agree that it is ridiculous to criticise mothers and not the system. In my brief experience with them, we couldn’t change their policy on screen savers, what hope do mothers have?
January 18, 2009 at 5:02 pm
LOL, I didn’t mean to imply that you were belittling the article.
Yup, leave sucks in this country, for everybody. Be it maternity or paternity leave, or disability… we take a “pull yourself up your bootstraps or sink to the bottom” mentality. And it is not just corporate America. Teachers, government employees… they all get 6 weeks paid. People with “lesser” jobs get 6 weeks UNPAID.