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

“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

“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. When you live in an artificial feeding culture, you miss the unconscious, lifelong lessons of how to hold your baby. Could you enjoy and be skilled at dancing if you had never seen it done and had only read about it in a book?”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“women who actually want to feed their babies frequently and exclusively are still viewed as odd in industrialised society. Health workers, relatives and society as a whole pressure mothers to ‘get back to normal’. That means not having a baby close to their body or in their bed and most definitely not giving a child free access to a breast. People will accept any means of shutting up a child’s crying except a mother offering her breast. Despite more acceptance than a few decades ago, negative feelings are still strong, especially with regard to older babies. The fact that responding to a child’s needs by giving her the breast was normal for 99.9% of humans’ existence, and ensured our survival as a species, makes current standards of ‘normality’ questionable.”
― 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

“When babies are fed at prescribed intervals and their time at the breast curtailed, then the wonderful dance that the bodies of a mother and her baby have spent nine months rehearsing cannot be performed. The process gets disrupted and may shut down. That is why so-called ‘insufficient milk syndrome’ increased as medicalised maternity services became established.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“if breastfeeding and low libido cause post-natal depression why are not all women in traditional societies in a permanent state of gloom? In spite of such hard lives many seem less miserable than women in industrialised society. The rates of severe post-natal depression are the same small percentage in all societies. Much of the depression suffered by new mothers in industrialised society arises because they lose social and economic recognition as individuals and are shut up in their homes. In societies where reproduction is admired and women are not excluded from society through childbearing, women are proud and happy to be mothers.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“The fact that the USA and some other countries have had to bring in laws to ‘allow’ women to breastfeed in public places illustrates the severity of the problem. I believe that not only is it a woman’s right to respond to her baby’s urgent need whenever and wherever it is necessary, but that public breastfeeding is essential to provide a model of normality. It is ludicrous that anxious new mothers pore over books and websites in order to try and breastfeed ‘in the correct way’! Where breastfeeding is a normal everyday event women have fewer problems than in societies where it is concealed.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“To this day ‘insufficient milk’ is the commonest reason that women give for abandoning breastfeeding. This is more common in societies where free access to the breast is socially deplored. Ironically, an idea that evolved from a fear of a non-existent problem (there has never been any good evidence showing the ill effects of too much breastfeeding) led to the establishment of a real problem.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business

“Modern reaction to wet nursing has sometimes been condemning of the rich family who may have risked the wet nurse’s child’s welfare in the interest of their own baby’s welfare. I see little difference between this and the fact that devoted middle-class parents in Europe and North America use a whole range of consumer goods, from baby clothes to toys and equipment, which are produced in the low-wage economies of Asian, African and Latin American countries. Many of the practical conveniences of our lives, from our clothes to the washing machine, are produced through the insecure and low-paid labour of women in the global economy who may forego breastfeeding their children to do it.”
― Gabrielle Palmer, The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts are Bad for Business