Breastfeeding not a feminist issue?

Annals of unsurprising news: Someone has finally studied the economic impact of breastfeeding and found, you guessed it, breastfeeding for a “long” time—anything more than six months—hurts a woman’s earnings. This via Slate’s Hannah Rosin, of “The Case Against Breastfeeding” fame, who correctly notes that the impact of breastfeeding on women’s earnings should be an obvious question, yet none of the breast-feeding literature mentioned it until now.

Like Rosin, I’m glad someone finally studied the question. It is maddening the way that the “breast is best” campaign treats the decision whether to breastfeed as if it occurred in a vacuum, as if it were solely an individual mother’s responsibility, rather than a social one—whether to create a society that enables breastfeeding or not. To push breast-feeding “as if it only affects an infant's health, and not the woman's life or position in her family, and her workplace” is wrongheaded. It’s also, by the way, an anti- or at the very least non-feminist move.

So Rosin’s right that not all efforts to push breastfeeding are feminist. Perhaps that’s all she means by her zinger of a last line: “Breast-feeding now loses its free pass into the feminist cause.” But she seems to imply much more—that breastfeeding isn’t a feminist issue at all.

It’s interesting to consider the history of the original breast-is-best-ers: the founders of La Leche League, who thought of themselves as early feminists and sought to wrest control of mothering back from the experts. At the time their movement arose, medicine typically assumed that mothers knew nothing about the business of mothering and that the female body was a defective object. Edwina Froehlich, one of the founders, was told by her doctor to forget about trying to breastfeeding because, at 36, she was too old. That she did so anyway must have been tremendously empowering. A friend of mine told me she once looked at her plump, six-month-old, entirely breastfed, child and thought proudly, “That’s all me.” Consider that no one but a nursing mother is ever indispensable to anyone. The inventors of formula sought to dispense with her.

As the La Leche League founders saw, breastfeeding is an issue about women's power. That makes it a feminist issue.

Yet the La Leche League founders were all Catholics housewives and they wrote in their breastfeeding manual as late as 1981, “Our plea to any mother who is thinking about taking an outside job is, ‘if at all possible, don’t.’ ”

That’s hardly a feminist position, precisely because it assumes the male-dominated standards of the work world, rather than questioning them. But that’s just what Rosin seems to be doing. There is, currently, a conflict between the demands of work and the needs of mothers; surely any feminist worth the name thinks it’s the work world that needs to change, not mothers.