Before the advent of infant formula and the regulation of the dairy industry, babies who were not breastfed faced mortal danger with every sip of cows’ milk. As a small installation I curated last year at the New York Historical Society demonstrated, medical and technological developments at the turn of the century transformed cows’ milk… Read more →
Tag: breastfeeding
Captivity, Breastmilk, and the Myth of Colonial Supremacy: An Interview with Carla Cevasco
Carla Cevasco is the winner of the second annual Nursing Clio Prize for Best Journal Article. Her winning submission, “‘Look’d Like Milk’: Colonialism and Infant Feeding in the English Atlantic World,” appeared in the Journal of Early American History in 2020. Dr. Cevasco is an assistant professor of American Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her… Read more →
Breastfeeding During War
The fireworks began at 7 pm, and my anxiety, already made worse by sleep deprivation, was heightened. I had just returned home with my newborn from a traumatic birth experience, and we were struggling to learn to breastfeed and find a sleeping pattern. That evening, after a lot of fuss, I had finally put her… Read more →
Bottled Racism: A Review of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice by Andrea Freeman
In recent years, the black maternal and fetal health crisis has been front page news, and for good reason. Black women die from pregnancy complications at three times the rate of white women, and the black infant mortality rate is more than double that of all other ethnic groups. Due to racism in the medical… Read more →
Whose Milk? Changing US Attitudes toward Maternal Breastfeeding
In the spring of 2018, government delegates from around the world gathered in Geneva, Switzerland for the World Health Assembly in affiliation with the United Nations. Delegates from Ecuador introduced a resolution, outlining a policy supporting maternal breastfeeding and calling for better regulation of the marketing of breastmilk substitutes. Most delegates expected the resolution to… Read more →
Black Nurse, White Milk: Wet Nursing and Slavery in Brazil
In 1888, Brazil became the last country to abolish slavery in the Western hemisphere. The process of emancipation in the country, however, had been gradual, beginning in 1850 with the final end of the slave trade. In the second half of the nineteenth century, legislation continued to chip away at the institution of slavery, including… Read more →
Mothers’ Natures: Sex, Love, and Degeneration in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Every so often, some viral article or other will declare that science “proves” or “confirms” that intelligence is inherited from mothers. (I know, because my own mother will promptly share it on Facebook.) Swiftly, of course, revisionary articles will appear correcting or debunking this claim, chastising armchair geneticists for their overly-simplistic understandings of the X-chromosome…. Read more →
The Magic Liquid that Guarantees the Life of the Infant: Breast Milk as a Superfood
“Try squirting milk on that.” I stopped keeping track of how many times someone recommended healing my newborn’s ailments with a direct application of breast milk. From the time my husband cut a nail too short to a slightly more serious case of pink eye, my friends and family had come to regard breast milk… Read more →
It’s Time to Take Nature to Task
In March of this year, one of my respected colleagues and I published a short essay in Pediatrics in which we critiqued the use of “nature” in public health campaigns, specifically regarding breastfeeding promotion. The piece came out on the heels of the publication of my first book, which examines the “back-to-the-breast” movement and the… Read more →
Clio Talks: An Interview with Historian Jessica Martucci
This week I had the pleasure of interviewing historian Jessica Martucci at length about her new book, Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America. We discussed the Mommy Wars, the politics of pumping, and the importance of playing devil’s advocate with lactivists and skeptics alike. What follows is a snippet of our… Read more →