I do not need to add any comment on this issue, which most Muslims do believe in, along with most oriental communities.. For Muslims, many rulings are based on Breastfeeding, concerning marriage, pregnancy, and social relationships.. Some historians had related this concern to an old practice, well known among Arabs in particular, where brotherhood would be constituted on breastfeeding-sharing at childhood.. However, it seems that science had aligned with Muslims, against the growing feminist campaigns..!!By Paul Doolan is Head of History at Zurich International School in Switzerland.
Whether or not mothers should nurse their own children has been a subject of debate from Ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome through all of modern European history to the present day. Paul Doolan reviews the arguments that have been presented over the centuries and the way in which fashions have changed.
Stories this year of thousands of Chinese infants made ill by contaminated milk powder briefly caught the world’s attention. Yet in 2007 alone, according to the United Nations International Children’s Educational Fund (UNICEF), one and a half million babies died who otherwise might not have done if they had been breastfed: a figure that compares with the number of those murdered at Auschwitz. The ‘bottle versus the breast’ controversy has raged for over a hundred years, but the no less contentious ‘mother versus wet nurse’ debate goes back much further in history.Obviously, before the arrival of farming, all human infants were breastfed. Since the dawn of homo sapiens there was no other choice. As Valerie Fildes, the medical historian, puts it: ‘Either an infant was breastfed by its mother, or some other mother, or it died.’ Romulus and Remus could count themselves very lucky. The ancient Egyptians recognized the vital importance of breastfeeding. Very early images show the goddess Isis suckling her son Horos and thereby, symbolically, the pharaoh. He is breastfed at birth, at his coronation and at his death. At each of these critical junctures in his life it is breast milk that provides him with spiritual nourishment and bestows immortality. The Egyptian concept of sacred milk was widespread in the Greco-Roman world where we find tombs containing statuettes of divine nursing mothers like Demeter, Gaia and Hera. The first Christian images of breastfeeding are already to be found in the catacombs of Rome, where the Virgin Mary nurses Jesus.
The rich and powerful could always hire a wet nurse, a job that Fildes refers to as ‘the second oldest profession’. The pharaohs, in reality, used wet nurses for their children; the royal wet nurse was held in such high esteem that her own children were considered ‘milk siblings’ of the pharaoh. The Code of Hammurabi, the first law code that we know of, provided regulations regarding wet nursing. Moses owed his life to a hired wet nurse, though unbeknown to her employer the wet nurse was actually his biological mother. The Greeks availed of duolos, special slaves or bondwomen, to feed their infants. Wet nurses were even hired to feed the babies of slaves, so that the slave would become fertile again and produce yet more children. In Plato’s totalitarian state, outlined in his Republic, allegiance to the state would be fostered by raising all children in communal crèches, away from their parents, where they were to be nourished by teams of wet nurses. In Rome, too, slaves were used as wet nurses by the rich, leading the early Christian author Tertullian to comment that an Emperor had been ‘reared on the milk of a Christian’. But a sense of snobbery meant that the most favoured wet nurses for Romans would be Greeks, thus allowing the infant to imbibe cultural as well as physical sustenance.
UNICEF website: http://www.unicef.org/programme/breastfeeding
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Alarmed by the widespread use of wet nurses by the rich, Greek and Roman authors like Aristotle, Pliny, Cicero, Tacitus and Plutarch strongly condemned the practice. They feared that it would lead to decadence and the loosening of family ties. It was a woman’s duty to nurse her own children, for this first familial bond of love formed the foundation that would later develop into a love of one’s patria or country and into a willingness to do one’s duty. A mother’s duty was clear and to reject it was to jeopardize the stability of society itself. Nevertheless, upper-class women defied, or were forced to defy, these views and the use of a wet nurse was recognized as a status symbol.
ReplyDeleteThe infant Muhammad, orphaned at birth, also survived thanks to the breast of a wet nurse. The Koran frequently emphasizes the importance of breastfeeding during the first two years of life. As in ancient Egypt, a wet nurse and her husband were considered to be a child’s ‘milk-parents’ and the laws of Islam forbade milk-relatives and blood relatives to intermarry. The influential Persian philosopher Avicenna and the Andalusian Jewish philosopher Maimonides both recommended two years as the correct period for breastfeeding. With the emergence of universities in Western Europe, and particularly in the great Medical College in Montpellier, the ideas of Aristotle, Avicenna and Maimonides regarding child care were passed on to Christian Europe.
As Northern Italy, France and Flanders developed at the beginning of the second millennium ad, the cult of the Virgin Mary began to dominate, most clearly demonstrated in the Gothic cathedrals dedicated to her, like Notre Dame de Paris and Chartres. In the words of Kenneth Clarke, the sculptures of the Madonna achieved a level of ‘ravishing beauty and delicacy’. She also dominated the world of painting and the images included the breastfeeding Madonna. From the late thirteenth century onwards, ‘Maria lactans’, with one breast entirely exposed, became increasingly popular. Works like ‘Madonna del latte’ by the Sienese painter Ambogio Lorenzetti are typical of this fashion. The stress on nourishment was, no doubt, meant to be interpreted as theological, but the fact that it appears at a time when war and the bubonic plague were causing ubiquitous famine may not be a simple coincidence. Margaret Miles, the American professor of historical theology, claims that the sudden popularity of images of the Virgin with one breast bare constituted ‘a remarkably explicit objectification of what was most certainly the most pressing personal and collective anxiety of fourteenth-century Tuscan people – the uncertainty of the food supply’.
Although his mother’s milk may have been good enough for Jesus, not everyone was convinced. The European nobility still favoured the wet nurse. From the eleventh century onwards, most aristocrats handed their infants over to the wet nurse, which contributed to a steep growth in fertility among aristocratic women, as they were now denied the contraceptive qualities of lactation. From the twelfth century all children born to the French royal family would be denied their mother’s breast (until Marie Antoinette bravely defied tradition). Partly this was to ensure the birth of plenty of children (potential heirs), but it may also have been done to provide the husband with access to his wife’s sexual favours, it being commonly believed that sex during lactation was an abomination of some sort and could even damage the child by polluting the breast milk. Even the king’s mistress never breastfed, worrying about the effects it might have on her charms. We can see this in the portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of Henry IV, where she worries about the attractiveness of her nipples while a wet nurse feeds her baby.
Humanist commentators, like Francesco Barbaro and Erasmus, continued to encourage mothers to breastfeed their infants while images of breast milk gushed across the giant canvasses of artists like Tintorreto and Rubens. With the growth of print culture and the rise in female literacy, women too could join the debate. In the early seventeenth century the brave Countess of Lincoln, in contravention of the habits of women of her social class, published a work calling on all mothers to breastfeed their children. In 1658 the wife of the Earl of Manchester proudly had it announced on her gravestone that she had breastfed seven of her children. Nevertheless, the tendency to have the work of breastfeeding done by a wet nurse continued to grow and the American historian Janet Golden has reported the claim that human milk became the most advertised commodity of the eighteenth century.
ReplyDeleteNo other people from the pre-photography age have left us such a detailed, intimate record of their everyday lives than the hard-working citizens of the prosperous United Provinces of the Netherlands. And it is in seventeenth-century Holland, with its lack of court culture and its bourgeois values, that we discover the beginnings of a new value, where a child at her mother’s breast, within a scrupulously clean interior, represents domestic intimacy. Pieter de Hooch painted church scenes but he was also a painter of what Simon Schama has referred to as ‘the idealized apple-pie domestic interior’. De Hooch’s ‘Breastfeeding Mother and Serving Girl’ offers us the quintessential scene: the floor is spotless, the cradle is close at hand, the fire in the hearth is blazing, the servant girl is working, caring for the older child. This domestic well-being reflects the orderliness of the city, glimpsed though the open doorway, while the person responsible for this perfect household, the diligent housewife, fulfils her role and offers her breast to the baby. As Marilyn Yalom puts it:
In the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic a new force entered the contest – that of civic responsibility. The lactating mother who provided for her child was seen as making a major contribution to the overall well-being of her household and community.
The Dutch were well ahead of the pack and it took the rest of Western Europe a century to catch up. During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century propagandists of breastfeeding went on the attack with gusto. Mothers who refused to breastfeed were, according to Cotton Mather, wife of an American puritan minister, in 1710 ‘dead while they live’. Benjamin Franklin commented that ‘there is no nurse like a mother’. The mammary gland loomed so large that the great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus decided that all humans should be classified as mammals. Indeed the frontispiece of his Fauna Suecia of 1761 featured a striking picture of the four-breasted goddess Artemis Ephesia. During the mid-eighteenth century the pre-eminence of the wet nurse in Britain was severely threatened when, as pointed out by Alysan Leven in History Today (December 2006), the likes of the medical practitioner William Cadogan began to propagate the idea that women should nurse their own children. Like the American Academy of Pediatrics today, he recommended that infants be breastfed for at least one year. By the latter half of the century it had become de rigueur among fashionable ladies in France to breastfeed their children. This was largely due to the phenomenal influence of the Genevan philosophe Jean Jacques Rousseau. His ideas regarding the noble savage and the soundness of following the natural way when raising children (except his own, all five of whom he dumped in an orphanage) inspired his contemporaries and caused a virtual revolution in feeling (and feeding). He attacked the great Plato, who put the State before the family, and asked: ‘Can patriotism thrive except in the soul of that miniature fatherland, the home?’ And, naturally, the centre of the home was the breastfeeding mother and child, protected by the strength of the father. Rousseau himself provided silk ribbons to young women about to marry, on condition that they promise they would breastfeed their potential newborns.
ReplyDeleteMarie Antoinette tried it – for once going against the express wishes of her domineering mother, the Austrian Empress Maria Therese, herself a mother of seventeen, all handed over to the wet nurse. The Austrian-born Queen of France thereby bravely brought to an end the centuries-old tradition of turning all royal children over to the wet nurse. In England, Marie Antoinette’s friend, the Duchess of Devonshire, defied pressure from her bullying in-laws, sacked the wet nurse and successfully breastfed her daughter in accordance with Rousseau’s precepts.
Although Rousseau’s ideas appealed to members of the upper-middle class and some members of the nobility, poorer working mothers in urban areas like Paris had little choice but to farm out their infants to village wet nurses, who often neglected their young charges. Consequently the death rate among such infants was appallingly high. Shocked by reports of what Simon Schama has called ‘this cottage industry of death’, the radical playwright Beaumarchais used the proceeds from his hit The Marriage of Figaro to establish an Institute for Maternal Welfare in order to encourage maternal breastfeeding.
Within a few years a younger generation of Rousseau’s converts swept away the French monarchy and executed the king and queen (despite the latter’s progressive ideas regarding breastfeeding). The zealots who now took power were firmly committed to new values – representative government, equality before the law and breastfeeding. Not to breastfeed was an indication of aristocratic, decadent values, opposed to the new bourgeois virtues of equality and duty. A revolutionary engraving of 1790, ‘Nature, as an egalitarian mother’, depicted the French nation nursing her two children, one white and one black. A medal commemorating the founding of the French Republic showed the radical leader Robespierre cupping the milk of freedom that spilled from Liberty’s breast and then handing it over to a patriot (an adult!) to drink. In art, breastfeeding, whether of a child or an adult, had become a political act, demonstrating patriotism and freedom.
ReplyDeleteIn 1792, the year that the French Republic was declared, Mary Wollstonecraft published her seminal Vindication of the Rights of Women, the founding text of modern feminism. While attacking Rousseau’s condescending attitude towards women, she agreed with him on breastfeeding, though for different reasons. A woman should breastfeed her child, not because she is biologically determined to, nor because she will thereby demonstrate civic virtue, but because she has a right to do so; and, by doing so, she has freed herself from the male expectation of her as simply a frivolous, pretty doll and an object of male sexual pleasure.
Political radicals throughout the nineteenth century kept the commitment to breastfeeding alive. In England, Shelley attempted to breastfeed his children himself. (Obviously, he failed and later abandoned the children and their mother to marry Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter, the future Mary Shelley.) In 1848 the French political activist and artist Honoré Daumier painted ‘The Republic’ to celebrate another French revolution. The Republic, represented by a strong, big woman, sits confidently holding the Tricolour while a healthy toddler suckles from each monumental breast and a third child sits at her feet reading a book. The allegory begs no question: the French State, like a good mother, will nourish and educate her citizens.
The ongoing argument of the maternal breast versus the wet nurse was broken in the second half of the nineteenth century by technology. For the first time the lactating breast had a competitor: the age of the bottle and baby formula was dawning.
Initially, baby formula had been invented to help those children, such as foundlings, who could not be breastfed. But, as the South African-born paediatrician Naomi Baumslag puts it, ‘the lure of the global market had become too much’. The invention of the rubber teat and the plastic bottle, together with the development of evaporated milk in 1885, coincided with increases in dairy production that forced producers to look for new markets. In 1905 the Swiss comp-any Nestlé was producing milk powder that contained no human milk and was selling this baby formula worldwide. By the 1960s hospital staff in the US and UK were feeding newborns Nestlé’s product and were routinely administering anti-lactation drugs to new mothers, who would go home with a little baby and a couple of free samples of baby formula. Suddenly the option not to nurse one’s own children was no longer restricted to the rich only.
Having conquered the industrial world, the baby formula producers turned their sights on markets in poorer countries. The combination of baby formula with contaminated water in the Third World killed, and continues to kill, hundreds of thousands of children each year.
In 1956 seven women in Illinois, concerned by the steady decline in breastfeeding rates, founded La Leche League. It developed into an international organization of women volunteers committed to lending support to families who choose to breastfeed. In 1979 an international network of public service groups, the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), was founded to campaign against what it saw as unethical marketing practices by baby formula companies, particularly Nestl챕. The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF became concerned and in 1981 the World Health Assembly voted to implement a voluntary code of behaviour to control the marketing of baby formula. The United States, bowing to pressure from the companies involved, was the sole country in the world to vote against the resolution.
ReplyDeleteGovernment reactions to the growth of baby formula sales were mixed. Following the Boer War (1899-1902) the British government began to be concerned that decreasing levels of breastfeeding might lead to a weakening of the race and, thereby, threaten the Empire. This was reflected in the 1902 Midwives Act and the setting up of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration in 1904. By contrast the fledgling infant welfare movement, while providing breastfeeding advice to young mothers, also began to provide instruction in the mixing of dried milk. World War II produced the Milk Industry Act, which included subsidies for the production of baby formula.
Nazi Germany, on the other hand, tried to counter what it saw as the decadence of the bottle, typical of the selfishness that characterized most aspects of modern life. Women’s emancipation was portrayed as a Jewish plot. The Nazis promised women ‘emancipation from emancipation’ and demanded that they return to their rightful place in the home, where they could fulfill their destiny as mothers. Mothers’ Day was made a national holiday and official propaganda promoted the message that the breast, with its racially pure milk, was best. The effect, however, was minimal.
After 1945 governments continued occasionally to voice their concern, but no measures of any substance were taken to promote breastfeeding against the bottle. In Britain since the 1990s the view that ‘the breast is best’ has been encouraged, but not backed with any affirmative action, though there is now talk of making it illegal to stop a woman breastfeeding in a public place, such as a restaurant. Only in Norway and, to a lesser extent, in Sweden has government intervention had a clear impact. In Norway bottle-feeding peaked in the 1960s but legislation and government-subsidized campaigns, particularly when Gro Harlem Brundtland was prime minister, turned the tide. By 2003, eighty per cent of Norwegian mothers were still breastfeeding their children at six months, compared with only thirty-two per cent in the US and twenty per cent in Britain.
The twentieth century was unique in the sense that, for the first time in history, it became a real possibility that breast milk could be replaced as the source of infant feeding. It was also unique in the fact that, by the end of the century, it was educated and higher-income mothers who were the most likely to continue breastfeeding their children the longest. It was certainly also the century that made the female breast into a commodity, readily available to the public gaze in print, television and cinema, and used to sell all sorts of goods and services – from motor cars and clothes to holidays and insurance policies.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the lactating breast, when it occasionally appears, still seems able to create great controversy.
Further Reading
Naomi Baumslag and Dia L. Michels, Milk, Money and Madness: the Culture and Politics of Breastfeeding (Bergin and Garvey, 1995); V. Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Basil Blackwell, 1988); Alysa Leven, ‘Reasonable Creatures’ in History Today (December 2006); Margaret R. Miles, ‘The Virgin’s One Bare Breast: female nudity and religious meaning in Tuscan early Renaissance culture’ in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University Press, 1986); Penny Van Esterik, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy (Rutgers University Press, 1989); Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (Balantine Books, 1997).