(Image: Good lord, am I really posting pictures of my breast on the Internet again? And oh how he has grown since this photo was taken, which by the way was me breastfeeding on the beach. Sandy.)
In responding to French author, Elisabeth Badinter’s new book, which argues that believing women must breastfeed is reducing women to the status of an animal species, I was tempted to write nothing more than You know, we actually are animals, right? But then I thought, that would be typical of you blue milk, you lazy sloth-like animal.
(I find the insinuation (which is not altogether uncommon) that the act of lactation is somehow degrading a curious thought. You mothers, you lactating mammals, how humiliating for you. Why exactly?)
She talks of an “underground ideological war”, of the “strong resurgence of naturalism”, of “guilting mothers”.
Badinter is right about the tyranny of motherhood. Beware of any new parenting trend that relies heavily on an already-over-stretched you for its achievement and which imposes almost no additional burden on anyone else (including the other parent). And be especially cautious of it if it also comes with a side-helping of guilt. Here is how Badinter sees it:
What is a “good mother” today?
She’s one who goes back to the fundamentals. She breast-feeds for six months; she doesn’t put her baby in a day-care center because a baby needs to be with her mother and not in a nest of germs; she doesn’t trust anything artificial and worries about the environment. For her, jarred baby food is a sign of selfishness: we’re back to Mommy’s mashed purée. A good mother is always there to listen, must watch over the child’s physical and psychological well-being; it’s a full-time job. I forgot to add, since she breast-feeds on demand, she’s supposed to let the baby sleep in the conjugal bed, which quashes intimacy for the parents and freezes out the father.
But equally, beware of the expert who tries to have you imagine that your baby is a tyrant.
Small as they are, babies hold their mothers prisoners: a mother is at the beck and call of her child, she has to accommodate herself to the child’s schedule, who sometimes gets to be prince/ss in the conjugal bed.
This is not only unhelpful but frankly, while we’re talking as feminists, it’s patriarchy-enabling. Babies are helpless little beings designed to fall in love and elicit love and just to generally survive. Really, however infuriating it gets caring for them, that is all a baby is trying to do – survive and love. (Sometimes it helps to look them in the face and acknowledge that to yourself). Whenever the tussle for fairness, for support, for needs being met, for scarce resources is waged between a mother and a baby somebody is being let off the hook, and I would argue that it is a whole society of somebodies. Take or leave ‘attachment parenting’ as you wish but raising human infants is not supposed to be done in isolation by a single caregiver, and yet overwhelming levels of individualism combined with conservative gender roles have positioned us in exactly that place. In our suburbs there is no-one else in the room when a mother reaches the end of her tether – there is no-one left to negotiate with – it is just an adult and a baby, crying in each other’s faces, desperate. No good or equitable negotiation is going to come out of that situation. It is this dynamic that makes “equality between the sexes and freedom for women impossible”, not a tyrannical infant nor a doormat of a mother.
But then you can’t entirely blame feminists like Badinter for being nervous about any ambitions to elevate motherhood either. They haven’t seen much good come out of the institution of motherhood for women – servitude, guilt, martyrdom, rampant biological determinism and invisibility. Still, given that most women end up being mothers, and given that a good deal of us even strongly desire motherhood there is no point throwing that particular baby out with the bath water. We won’t elevate women anytime soon by denigrating motherhood. And for feminism, we are still trying to resolve that split: whether the path to true liberation is via refusing ‘caring work’ and fully incorporating ourselves into the market economy by emulating ‘male labour’ or whether liberation will only come when we instead put our energies towards agitating for full recognition of traditional ‘female work’ (ie. domestic and caring work) in the economy.
In my next post I think I will move away from Badinter but continue with the idea of breastfeeding as a form of oppression. I have been meaning to write about that idea for so long. Right now I just remembered that I am tiiiiiired tonight.
Yes! All of that. And you’re energetically engaging arguments that I find so tiresome …
But also: am I the only one who thinks “conjugal bed” is a creepy, creepy phrase? (Okay, I get that I’m talking about a translation issue, but still–”conjugal bed”–eww.)
It makes me think of that Smiths song…
I agree. I’ve long been troubled by the argument put forward by some feminists that the “problem” women face is breastfeeding, or that the “problem” is cosleeping, or attachment parenting, or any other parenting choice. The problem as you rightly point out, is the PATRIARCHY – and furthermore the entire structure of American society, which places women in an absurd situation of praising motherhood as the ultimate goal of all “good girls” while making it almost impossible to *be* a mother without going slap out of your mind. Mothers need: to be treated with dignity and compassion in hospitals; to have a strong support network; access to short and full time affordable day care for their children (even SAHMs need occasional breaks); paid, extended maternity leave; family-friendly policies in the workplace; husbands and fathers who *pull their weight*, etc etc etc. I found the same at the heart of that dreadful Rosin article – let’s bypass all the structural elements that oppress women and instead, um, blame breastfeeding ! As though the invention of bottle feeding made women’s lives easier, cheaper, more FREE or more fulfilling (let’s not forget it’s a product of the 40s and 50s, hardly a Golden Age for women’s rights). Women are doing AMAZINGLY in industrialized nations with near 90% breastfeeding rates. I hardly think a Swedish woman looks on herself as being less “free” than an American. In fact, there is significantly more gender parity in those countries than in our own.
(All that said, and intensely meant, it is absolutely true that all discourses about motherhood, including BF, can be co-opted by the forces of conservative gender dynamics who want women at home 24-7 caring for her children in complete isolation from the world, and that when this appears, feminists must fight it.)
PS Sorry to monopolize so much space, but what really bothers me as a feminist about Badinter’s and Rosin’s argument is that it’s only purpose is to discourage the BF initiative, including women’s right to BF in public and pushes to get employers to mandate pumping spaces or in-house daycare – intentionally or not, they are setting back women’s rights by being anti-BF, by saying this issue doesn’t matter or should be supressed.
Thanks for posting this, I was aware of Badinter’s views, but not that she has a book. It is a book I’d like to read.
I spent the weekend at the feminism conference in Sydney. Aside from my workshop (where I recommended your blog), there was little about mothering. (I’ve written about this on my blog – in fact there was action that undermines my feminist parenting.)
I agree with you, and Molly and Erin. We need to be talking about structures that support parenting. At the same time, I now think we don’t just need women to be everywhere (in politics, on boards, working in advertising) but we need mothers to be everywhere (in politics, on boards, in advertising). Without changing work culture, improving services for families (and everyone) including parental leave, child care, public health, public education and public transport, it isn’t going to happen.
Scandinavian countries and France are usually held up as the places where parenting is supported and gender equality is pretty good. To see that the situation in France is being criticised by a feminist gives me food for thought. Thanks.
I was linked here by a friend, and wanted to drop a link to something else I read today on this very topic: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-bartick/ipeaceful-revolutioni-mot_b_536659.html. She gets pretty specific about exactly who we should be putting on the hook.
I was proud to be a lactating mammal. It gave me a huge sense of satisfacton to be the only food source for this tiny being who depended on me entirely. It was also a huge responsibility which made me want to cry when she cluster-fed. But I was almost sad when at six months she could start on solids. Almost.
I never saw anything degrading in identifying as a mammal. I wanted it on a t-shirt. But then I’m quite happy that we are descended from apes as well. Maybe that’s the difference?
Badinter takes issue with a number of movements, but the one I immediately (and most simply) take issue with is the environmental movement.
It isn’t only mothers who are spending more time on daily tasks because they care for the environment. In many ways in the western world people are slowing down to live more simply, whether this means growing food and composting, or cooking from scratch or walking/cycling/using public transport rather than driving, and buying second hand goods or reducing their consumption. Perhaps becoming a parent causes people to think about the future of the planet and how we use our limited resources and how much waste we create, but many people are already doing this. There are obvious benefits regarding health, wellbeing, and often, expense.
I thought that France having a capped working week meant that the French had time to live simply and be conscious about resources and waste.
Also, a review of her book states that
What she deems important and in need of defending:
- the diversity of women’s desires and lifestyles
- the possibility of reconciling the role of the mother and the desires of the woman
- the fact of being a woman should not be limited to the fact of being a mother
- the multifacetedness of maternal love and the ways of expressing it
So that sounds good.
Ugh. I taught The Slap today to undergrads (mostly females), and the way they talked about breastfeeding made me sad. They were so repelled by it, especially any question that extended breastfeeding is healthy and acceptable, and not some kind of sexual dysfunction/smothering on the part of a mother.
Fantastic post! This expresses what I’ve felt for a long time. Motherhood can be a time consuming, maddening and vulnerable experience but blaming the child has always seemed very self-serving on society’s behalf – allowing the real culprits such as economic inequality and unfair division of labour to be ignored.
I remember how much it shook my world to learn that the English word for mother is derived from the Latin for “has mammaries” – that mammals are so-named expressly for the ability of the female of the species to lactate, as opposed to, say, being named for the presence of body hair/fur (which was another contender). I remember having felt a sense of outrage that as an entire kingdom of animalia could be so reduced to this one bodily function (not to mention, hello, erasure/dismissal of non-gender-conforming bodies/people), and then when I learned that I was going to become a mother, it shook my world all over again, and I had to try and navigate what that all meant.
Talking with my own mom helped a lot, as we were able to discuss issues like breastfeeding/attachment parenting and eventually I began to see it as just another false dichotomy that functioned to keep mothers locked in these intracommunity battles (hello, internalized oppression!) instead of focused on our common enemy: kyriarchy, with all its divisiveness and reduction to individualism that makes parenting as difficult as it is. Reading something like I forgot to add, since she breast-feeds on demand, she’s supposed to let the baby sleep in the conjugal bed, which quashes intimacy for the parents and freezes out the father now just makes me sad instead of angry, because love shouldn’t be a zero-sum game. Part of me wants to point out that a. there are other places to have sex/intimacy goes beyond sex and b. isn’t it a little odd to focus on “freezing out” the father cause it’s not like his libido is the only thing at stake here but ultimately I just kinda sigh and wish, like you, that we could work with other mums and take on this kyriarchy thing already.
(I often wonder if being polyamorous has helped us transition to parenthood. I think it has, in terms of being able to conceptualize and implement the practical realities of navigating a third/fourth set of needs and expectations – but please, hear me stress that this does not mean I think poly parents = better parents. Just that the skillset I learned through poly practice may have helped with the balancing bits of parenthood. But that’s a tangent.)
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Elisabeth Badinter is an advertising billionaire, heir to and partner of Publicis, Nestle’s ad agency. Badinter prefers to brand herself as an intellectual with a feminist critique of La Leche League, rather than an ad women selling artificial baby milk. Harper’s Magazine fell for her ruse, running a public relations hit piece on La Leche League and breastfeeding in their February 2012 issue without mentioning the author’s substantial financial stake in the issue. “The Tyranny of Breasteeding: New Mothers vs La Leche League” Oh, come on. They need to be publicly and loudly chastised for giving the corporate shill free advertising time. Email Harper’s at letters@harpers.org to let them know how you feel.
The main pitch in the article is her claim that LLL erases “..all the other aspects of breast feeding: the loss of freedom and the despotism of an insatiable child.” Buy formula and your infant will be less demanding. Buy formula and parenthood won’t change your life. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
Her article is a publicist’s case of envy over the success of the La Leche League’s success in reducing the amount of baby formula sold. She modestly passes on the opportunity to extoll the successful and lucrative campaign by baby formula companies, with the help of Publicis, which popularized the profitable idea of replacing breast feeding in the first place.
As a feminist working mom, I am infinitely fascinated by babies, women, moms, nursing, dads, society and family, and childcare. I love this thoughtful post, and the posts linked to it. Badinter is kind of interesting, but she is dishonest about the conflict of interest between her financial benefit from the sale of artificial baby milk via her partnership in Publicis and her claim to intellectual feminist critique. I can’t help but read “BUY ENFAMIL” in most everything she writes.
thank you for the insight – makes sense (have not read her article yet but i am getting an idea:)