Gabrielle Palmer > Quotes

“In spite of lip service paid to domestic duties, in 1881 the Census excluded women’s household chores from the category of productive work and, for the first time, housewives were classified as unoccupied.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“Damaging hospital practices made breastfeeding a near-impossible procedure and only women with alternative sources of support and knowledge were able to do it.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“There are no memorials to the thousands of women who died prematurely through extreme physical hardship. These were the women who produced and serviced the workers who created the wealth and consequent power of Europe and North America.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“Doctors, however, are just as vulnerable to marketing tactics as the rest of us; companies merely use different methods to seduce them.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“The influence of bottle-feeding makes many people think that ‘nipple sucking’ is breastfeeding. It is not. If the baby sucks his mother’s nipples as he would a bottle teat, it damn well hurts.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“sleeping ‘through the night’, even for adults, is a particularly modern concept linked with industrialisation.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“When researchers looked at all the possible means of preventing infant and young child death they found that improving breastfeeding practices could prevent more deaths than any other single strategy; even more than such key benefits as the provision of safe water, sanitation, immunisation and medical services.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“No amount of advice will prevent the women from carrying on this deadly habit.” This was written in 1917, but the attitude was still around in 1952 when clinic nurses were advising mothers that seven to nine months was the desirable length of time for breastfeeding.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“misguided propaganda on infant feeding should be punished as the most miserable form of sedition, and that these deaths should be regarded as murder.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“In every country, rich or poor, thousands of babies are treated for illness every day because they are given foods and fluids other than breastmilk.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“If poor people were not diagnosed as incompetent, to whom would the experts sell their expertise?”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“Confidence plays a huge part and if a woman has seen breastfeeding all her life and assumes it works, then she will have it.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“It is of interest that ‘brands’ came into being in the 19th century to protect the public from contaminated, adulterated or falsely described food. Cheating our fellow human beings existed long before industrialisation. Watering the milk or making bread with contaminated flour goes back to ancient times.2 Brands were established to indicate trust in product quality because the buyer could trace the provider. However the current use of brand power by big food corporations is not driven by the quest to improve nutrition but to manipulate the psychological perceptions of the consumer in order to maximise profits. That initial trust of the ‘brand’ has been exploited to extremes and has become a worshipped marketing tool.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, Complementary Feeding: Nutrition, Culture and Politics