Status Updates From Milk: An Intimate History o...

Slave masters were heavily involved in making decisions regarding the care of the babies, and would force Black mothers to nurse their children on a schedule that would allow them to also continue manual labour. Wet-nursing was 'a uniquely gendered form of exploitation of the highest order that compromised their motherhood'.

I think back to Hera and Juno, the divine wives whose milk was taken from them as they slept. We know that Hercules obtains immortality, that the galaxy is created and lilies flower, but what happened to Juno? To Hera? What happens afterwards?

On his famous homecoming after a decade-long absence, the first person to recognise Odysseus was his former wet nurse, Eurycleia.

Chat was this in the movie

Wet nurses tended to hold high positions in Southeast Asian cultures, too; in some Buddhist cultures in these regions, a wet nurse was a symbol of generosity, so much so that evidence shows that rulers left great wealth to their wet nurses to repay them the debt they believed they were owed.

Painted as slovenly and neglectful, wet nurses were often vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, in Europe as well as in the colonies, where enslaved women were coerced into nursing white settlers' babies. Seldom is concern towards wet nurses found in the literature. In the nineteenth century.

Wet-nursing itself can represent fragmentation as well as union. At times, the practice of women feeding babies other than their own solidifies communities and strengthens bonds. At other times, it impacts marginalised groups and the autonomy of a woman over her own body.

In the UK, there are many women who have nursed babies belonging to their friends or family and who have done so for a wide variety of reasons. But the extent to which the idea of wet-nursing has fallen out of public favour in twenty-first Britain is demonstrated by the fact that even in the midst of our own feeding struggles, it was never suggested that I might look into the milk of another woman.

The 1881 UK census was the first to classify housewives as unoccupied, an expression of the bureaucratic impact of the separation of work and motherhood. The fashioning of the family into a unit of consumption rather than production. It was brutal because working mothers could no longer juggle childcare and paid work. They were no longer free to pause work to attend to a hungry baby.

When women use substitutes for breastfeeding, they can be viewed as lazy and/or responsible for any negative health outcomes, rather than seen as making the best choices they can within their circumstances.

The idea of the 'naturalness' of breastfeeding often masks a lack of funding for mothers and support services. If it is framed as a 'natural’ and fulfilling role for women, then it is not deemed 'work' and, therefore, the burden and costs associated with breastfeeding fall on women.

The factory system fragmented craftsmanship into repetitive tasks at a machine and, so, the maternal body started to become thought of as a machine too, reducible to parts and tasks. The language used to describe maternal labour is often connected to the worlds of factories and production. Where is the idea of the body as a complex home? Where is the desire?

The result is that accept graphic depictions of lactation in seventeenth-ury allegorical paintings but feel unsure when it comes breastfeeding in twenty-first-century cafés.

I was glad if some people found breastfeeding distasteful; if they harboured a discomfort at seeing a woman use her body for something other than to please the rest of the world, then I wanted to provoke it.

Breastfeeding is never apolitical, 'given the way it positions women's bodies in relation to infants and partners, the issues it raises for women in public spaces, and how it forces a reconceptualisation of the idea of the autonomous individual that is the basis for Western conceptions of the civic polity and, thus, citizenship.

In the UK, for example, extended maternity leave is legally mandated and employers are required to provide space and facilities for mothers who need to express milk during the working day. If breast milk could be purchased in the supermarket, what would happen to the need for support and flexibility for lactating parents?

When wet-nursing fell out of favour, women were no longer paid for lactation and it became part of unpaid reproductive labour. Citing emotional fulfilment as the sole reward is a fantastic way of placing the burden of economic care onto the individual family unit. But emotions don't get us very far when we must pay the rent.

She notes statutory maternity pay isn't enough to survive on; 'so, as she unclips her bra again she is producing a person and replenishing the capitalist commodity of labour power'. Her breastfeeding, even when feeding on demand, forms part of a larger economic and political order.

Yet as I read these publications, I want to scream: if women were not breastfeeding because they worried it might ruin their figures, who was dictating what a 'ruined' figure looked like?
Ultimately, men, I'd imagine. And if breastfeeding was of such national importance, why, decades later, was it made much harder for them by the demands of industrialisation?

That said, I did not consider formula to have a place in the motherhood I had envisaged for myself - an ideal I had conjured from all the cultural and societal references I'd absorbed over my lifetime. But I also desperately wanted my body to continue making life, to make the substance that connected me to him.

How can we simply tell a woman that her breast milk is best, after she has endured a lifetime of being told her body is - somehow - shameful?
For all the beautiful images of breastfeeding conjured in words and pictures, it remains true that the lactating body has long been deemed inferior to the male body.

She writes, 'It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’ It is not so much the perceived uncleanliness of the leaking milk or vaginal blood that causes offence, but instead the way this disrupts and exceeds the borders of the body.

My body was now very clearly somebody else's home and I had developed an intense, protective love for the stranger who inhabited me. My body was a house and I felt perhaps more at home than at any other time of my life. I was fecund and rounded and contained.

And I can't even think about it in depth because the memories of those postnatal minutes sting like a microscopic paper cut that I didn't know was hidden there, within the folds of life continuing.

But this certainty and this sense of strength wasn't to last long, because the 'good' mother I strived to be was always accompanied by her shadow, who revealed herself to be fragile and bewildered, in need of guidance and support. What I failed to remember at that time was that there are many ways to be strong, and many kinds of power.

In Cambodian, birth is referred to as chlong tonle, "crossing the river'. That is, a time of transition, of in-betweenness, of hoping to reach the shore. The river could be choppy and the lives of those crossing at risk, or the waters calm and smooth with no unexpected currents. You just don't know until you are in the water.

The cultural messages I see again and again are that mothers are harassed, weary and neglected. Mothers are deeply content, happily tenacious and grounded. Mothers, including Mother Nature, are everything and nothing.

Sir Astley Cooper placed an emphasis on the importance of a mother's mental and physical well-being for the success of breastfeeding. According to him a 'tranquil state of mind' and a 'cheerful temper' are best for healthy lactation. He describes how grief, terror and anxiety can all disrupt milk supply, sometimes putting a stop to lactation altogether.

The composition of breast milk will differ depending on whether the mother has a son or a daughter, and whether this is the first baby or not. Evidence also shows that glucocorticoids - a class of steroid hormones including cortisol, the 'stress' hormone - are also transferred in milk, influencing the potential behaviour of the offspring.

But grief and trauma can haunt those who wished to nurse but found their experiences were complicated or cut short, whose feeding decisions were not respected. The wound festers silently, sometimes for decades.

We each carry our own unique baggage with us into parenthood, inscribed by race, class, our familial struc-tures, histories. Our choices have always been historically dependent, influenced by societal trends and prevailing ideas of parenthood.