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A wet nurse (for that is what Hera was in all tellings of the story) created the Milky Way when her divine milk sprayed across the heavens. Today’s nursing mothers are not so blessed. Although women have a legal right to breastfeed in public across the United States and the UK (and many other countries), there are plenty of individuals who seem to think that they have the right to tell them to stop, and plenty of new mothers who are intimidated enough not to try. Why? How can this most essential of food chains possibly be considered shameful? And then there are the women who would dearly love to breastfeed their infants, but cannot. In this episode, experts on infant feeding discuss the history and current status of mothers’ milk and its various substitutes.
Notes
- Professor Amy Brown’s website is full of amazing resources for and about nursing mothers.
- Lindsay Naylor is a political geographer. Her paper Troubling care in the neonatal intensive care unit and others prompted me to dig deeper.
- Professor Lawrence Weaver wrote White Blood: A History of Human Milk. His website “is a kind of autobiography”.
- There was no way I could cover the contamination at the Abbott infant formula plant. Helena Bottemiller Evich originally broke the story and has been following it closely. Her latest roundup sticks it to the Food and Drug Administration with a detailed accounting.
- The transcript has finally arrived.
Very interesting information that doesn’t normally cross one’s desk.
https://media.blubrry.com/eatthispodcast/mange-tout.s3.amazonaws.com/2022/doppia-pesata.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 16:03 — 14.8MB)Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Android | RSS | More
At the end of the previous episode on mothers’ milk Professor Amy Brown mentioned an important source of anxiety for new mothers: they cannot easily see how much their baby has eaten, and that pushes them to use a see-through bottle and switch from breast to formula. It may surprise you to learn that the Italian Fascist regime came up with a solution 90 years ago. In this episode, Professor Diana Garvin provides some insights into Fascist breastfeeding, and a friend of mine explains how it lingered to traumatise mothers 50 years on, and continues to do so today.
As for why this episode is being published today, rather than on Monday, that’s because the Fascists chose 24 December 1933 to first celebrate the Giornata della madre e del fanciullo, the day of the mother and the child. Why Christmas Eve? Diana Garvin says it was “originally meant to coincide with the mother Mary’s labour pains. Ostensibly.”
That ostensibly is interesting, because while they might have been against the church, the Fascists must have known that Mary suffered no labour pains at all. At least not after the middle of the 14th century.
That was when Birgitta Birgersdotter, later to become St Bridget of Sweden, had a vision in the little town of Bethlehem, one of a series of visions that started when she was quite young, which had a profound impact on art and depictions of the nativity. Bridget relates how, in this vision, she “saw the One lying in her womb then move; and then and there, in a moment and the twinkling of an eye, she gave birth to a Son, from whom there went out such great and ineffable light and splendor that the sun could not be compared to it”. In another vision, Mary says “When I gave birth to him, it was also without any pain.” So, no labour pains.
Giotto’s Nativity from the lower church in Assisi, painted around 1310 and thus before St Bridget, shows a reclining Mary, who may well be exhausted by her labour.
Before Bridget, many depictions of the nativity show Mary lying down exhausted and resting, as a new mother surely would. After, she is usually shown kneeling before the baby emanating light, along with the manger, Joseph and a candle and various other details she envisioned.
Notes
Diana Garvin’s latest book is Feeding Fascism: The Politics of Women’s Food Work published by University of Toronto Press. Articles include Taylorist Breastfeeding in Rationalist Clinics: Constructing Industrial Motherhood in Fascist Italy and Reproductive Health Care from Fascism to Forza Nuova.
I am very grateful to my friend Susan for sharing her memories of breastfeeding her son in Italy.
Huge thanks to Jennifer Wilkin Penick for alerting me to the significance of St Bridget in the history of art.
We have a transcript.
St Bridget’s words from The Prophecies and Revelations of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden.
Cover photo by Lucy Clink.
Music: Jumbel from Blue Dot Sessions.
Huffduff it
Neapolitan nurture! It took a while, but the transcript of the episode on Mothers and Milk is now available at eatthispodcast.com/mothers-milk/
These are such great images!
That was such an interesting and important podcast Jeremy, thanks! the last little segment finally got to the thing i was thinking of from personal experience, which is how difficult it can be to get started breastfeeding and how support might be lacking. thats another element of the issue that could be more openly addressed.
I never considered how much we take something like baby formula for granted. Having had a child failed to thrive due to a dairy allergy, formula with synthetic was essential in working through this.
Looking forward to listening! Thank you Jeremy ; )
…also stay tuned for an soon to be published commentary on the infant formula crisis!
The wait is over. Hands-down my favourite Madonna Lactans, by Federico Barocci. Funny, no-one ever seems to tell the BVM to cover up. Mortal women get that all the time.
eatthispodcast.com/mothers-milk/ explores all that and more with @Prof_AmyBrown @LB_Naylor and others