In the 1970s many women protested that they were shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar set for housework. Now, some say, it’s not the vacuum cleaner that’s oppressing women, but another sucking sound …
Sarah Butters has trouble admitting it, because no one admits it, but she hates breast-feeding. She fed both of her children formula. ”I feel so angry about this. There is so much pressure on women,” says Butters (35), mother of Isobel (5) and Eliza (2), and editor of a local parenting magazine in Leeds, in the north of England.
”As a mother you feel you should be able to feed your child and I just couldn’t do it.” After six days of trying and failing, she realised the baby was desperately hungry and got out a bottle.
Five years on she still feels bad about it. ”In this attempt to make sure I was pleasing everyone by being a ‘good mother’, I had continued trying to the detriment of my daughter. My husband gave her the bottle and I went into the other room and cried for an hour.”
An increasingly vocal majority of women are struggling with breastfeeding or abandoning it — and are fed up with being made to feel terrible. The blogs on the subject are pitiful: ”Does anyone else hate breast-feeding, but do it anyway?” ”I hate breast-feeding, but I know it is so much better for him.” ”Hating breast-feeding, feeling guilty.”
Now academics are starting to ask whether the pressure on women to breast-feed is becoming counterproductive. Sue Battersby, a researcher and lecturer in midwifery, argues that we need to start supporting women who use formula. ”Mothers who formula-feed are treated like second-class citizens,” she says.
Dr Michele Crossley, a psychologist at the University of Manchester, England, recently published a paper entitled Breast-feeding As a Moral Imperative, which concludes that ”far from being an ’empowering’ act, breast-feeding may have become more of a ‘normalised’ moral imperative that many women experience as anything but liberational”.
A British academic who is researching breast-feeding and maternal identity says: ”It has become a war. ‘Did you breast-feed? What kind of person are you?’ It has become an index of your capacity as a mother.” She would only speak anonymously because she is concerned about attacks from the pro-breast-feeding lobby.
In the United States a huge backlash against the breast-feeding lobby is gaining ground and the debate is polarising into ”lactofanatics” versus ”formula apologists”. An article in Atlantic Monthly, ”The Case Against Breastfeeding” by Hanna Rosin, has sent the US blogosphere into hysterics. Rosin questions the economics of breast-feeding: ”It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.”
Many mothers speak of the ”pressure for the milk to be pure” (that is, their own and not ”tainted” by formula). It has become common for mothers to refer to formula as ”poison” — either partly in jest or out of guilt.
Some see the promotion of breastfeeding as part of the problem. Last month saw the reissue of The Politics of Breast-feeding by Gabrielle Palmer, a nutritionist who argues that ”in the United Kingdom a millionaire’s formula-fed baby is less healthy than the exclusively breastfed baby of a poor mother”.
Dubbed ”the freakonomics of motherhood”, the book demands that the advertising of formula milk be banned, calls for breast milk to be given an award for the fewest food miles and praises women for producing ”the most ecological food product in the world”. So now not only is breast-feeding nutritionally correct, it’s also environmentally ethical.
Palmer says, however, that she is not promoting breast-feeding, she is just stating the facts: that we often have no idea of the real ingredients in formula milk (according to her book, fish eyes, potatoes and algae have been found in batches of formula). She also believes women should be provided with a financial incentive. ”In our society we do things for kudos and for money. Women get neither for breast-feeding.”
Feeding should be whatever makes sense to the mother, says Dr Ellie Lee, a sociologist at Kent University, England, and author of a report on mothers who use formula. ”There is no one who would not concede that breast milk is good for babies. But the body that provides the milk is connected to a whole set of social relationships.
”When it doesn’t work, women take it so personally. They will say: ‘My baby hates me’. It’s such a destructive thing to do to mothers. And I think the pressure is getting worse.” —