(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. How sandy. I first posted this piece almost two years ago but a lot of these same issues are still being thrashed out in the media today.)
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 scarce resources, for needs being met 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.
“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.”
I suspect the trouble is that worth is being defined (within western society at large) solely in terms of the economy, period.
You make so many really good points in this post.
I think what frustrates me about Badinter, and about what Hanna Roisin and Judith Warner have written on the subject is that they seem to buy into the same patriarchal assumption that I hear from the right wing- the idea that I necessarily have to choose between my family and my work. I’m still really confused about why I have to choose. Why can’t I do the caring work some of the time (and have it be valued) and participate fully in the market economy some of the time? Why can’t we all just expect our workplaces to provide the flexibility and support that enables that? Why can’t we all just expect that our partners will be full partners, and do some of the caring work, too? Why can’t I just expect to have the same full and varied life that my husband has? THAT is what I want our society to work toward.
I think I have achieved this in my own life. It isn’t perfect, and there are a boatload of things I’d change about our work culture and our society’s support of families- but I think I have this combination of family and work. But I know it must be rare, because so few people believe me that I have it and am happy. I want to fix that. I don’t want people telling me that I’m “lucky” to have what I consider to be something that everyone should be able to have if they want it.
I want my two little girls to grow up expecting that if they choose to become mothers, their society will not try to tell them that they are necessarily choosing to give up any of their other dreams. I don’t want them to hear what I hear over and over- that my life is impossible. Because it isn’t. Improbable? Maybe. Predicated on a lot of luck and privilege? Definitely. But not impossible. So why can’t we all work to make the life I have less dependent on luck and privilege? Why can’t we make it a real option available to any woman who wants it?
I love this post. I agree that anyone who promotes the binary of baby-tyrant/mother-slave is serving the patriarchy. Laurie Oaks has a fantastic chapter about the maternal-fetal split in her wonderful book about smoking and pregnancy. My children aren’t seeking to oppress me: that’s some cultural projection right there.
Plus I found that no one ever told me that I would WANT to be with my baby: that my decisions that fall under attachment parenting had a lot more to do with my desires and less to do with intellectual fact-checking. I stayed with my babies because I wanted to. I worked as little as possible because I wanted to (although, I did still want to work). I nurse because (at least until they hit 2 and get bossy about it) I want to. There’s this implication in language like Bandinter’s that you do these things out of obligation, not from actual desire: that all women embodying this “good mother” definition are doing so because they feel they have to. But I just wanted to.
There is a book about smoking and pregnancy?! Holy crap I need to find that for my friend…
Thank you. I am thinking more and more frequently about parenting – do I want to and if so how? Your wisdom is incredibly useful! I think the fear of not being supported while trying to do it is probably the biggest thing putting me off. It is a cliche, but I do love “it takes a village to raise a child”, but if you don’t have a community with values that you can accept that makes it really difficult to achieve. I would be really keen on having my parents involved, if I wasn’t so worried about my mum’s values!
Also I agree with Cloud completely. I want to use my education and skills to work outside, as well as inside, the home but I am terrified of finding myself in a job where I can’t balance, and of the same happening with my partner.
I don’t have any insights to add about feminism, but I am greatful for how it helps me frame my concerns and how it guides me to make decisions that are best not just for me but also for my family (currently not including children but who knows about the future).
“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” — A small point in the context of the full essay, but that isolation is largely a byproduct of land ownership by the wealthy and the professionalization of – and professional monopoly on – creation of the geography of personal space and work space. The conventions and institutions that have supported women and babies through most of human history – i.e., the village structure – have disappeared not because of gender roles or because women think they can and should do it all themselves, but because when the goal is maximum profit, the needs of real human beings become irrelevant.
Linda, I like your point a lot.
The elements of the problem that I am specifically referring to, though, are the ways in which individualism outside the home and sexism within the home isolate and exhaust mothers with their babies. There isn’t a lot of community-based support for mothers and babies or affordable ‘help’ because we tend to view babies as a private cost rather than a social cost (and social benefit). There isn’t a hell of a lot of support for mothers inside their home in terms of juggling unpaid work with paid work because we tend to view unpaid work as female work, and also tend not to even see it as ‘work’.
I second that !
Thank you, Linda, well said.
Yes to what you all have said, but also a very small point in addition. Breastfeeding was actually a thing that allowed quite a lot of freedom when my baby was small, because it meant I was mobile and could get around easily with the baby and feed him anywhere. It meant I could easily keep up with meetings with my academic supervisor, go to the library and all that kind of thing. After we also had to carry food and formula and all the equipment that goes with it, all that became much, much harder, and then I did have to choose between with baby/without baby for activities that we had easily been able to do together before. I know it’s not an earthshatterng insight, but it was a very pleasant surprise at the time.
@ Pen
Exactly. Breastfeeding gave me a lot of freedom, too. And I did it almost everywhere … sometimes receiving odd looks, sometimes not …
Hey there – just looking into badinter and I knew you would have something intelligent to say about it… My first instinct is that it is a piece of bitter younger women/ mother bashing but on another ( much more rational) level, what concerns me is the complete unbalanced view on breastfeeding – as if there had not been a concerted backlash against breast milk that saw a generation of women formula feed and sometimes , in some places, with really bad outcomes not to mention the ethics and politics of making women’s body ( fluid and beastly!) grotesque pollutant needing to be contained…It is any wonder that breastfeeding is actively promoted and reappropriated by many women now – particularly those who can and realise the huge benefits of it.. Thanks as always for the post!
Thanks Shelley, lovely to see you on-line.
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