When, in the post-WW2 period, public health people questioned
the alarming drop in the number of newborns who were being breastfed (while
still in the hospital, where such things could be recorded — just less than 50%
of new mothers did so), they found a correlation between “rooming in” and “not
rooming in.” Rooming in meant that the infant remained in the room with its
mother. Rooming out meant being shipped off to the nursery — you know the kind,
where rows and rows of swaddled babies are looked at through glass by
haggard-looking, smoking fathers, trying to figure out which one’s his.
The only possible response to this is: DUH.
Where is the incentive to nurse when your baby isn’t there?
If you don’t start, you can’t continue. This is also the era in which SCIENCE
was king, as evidenced by the concept and language of this chapter on
sterilization. Note the large role the physician plays in determining what
should be a no-brainer. Milk from the breast needs no sterilization. Yet this was
the era in which women were venturing out into the workplace, and at the very
least, were expected to wear extremely tailored clothing (like the lady in the
picture), which doesn’t realistically allow for a figure thickened by baby
weight or milk-heavy boobs.
This chapter is disingenuous. It begins with the rather
accusatory question “What is more important than your baby?” but then treats
the baby as an object. Even childbirth was seen as being unpleasantly physical
an experience to share with your baby, something that had to be erased from
your memory even while it was happening, with twilight sleep. You went into the
hospital pregnant; you woke up in bed not pregnant. With your child nowhere to
be seen.
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| Click to enlarge to read the whole thing |
It is no accident that the milk substitute fed to infants is
called formula. A formula is a solution, not a food.
Pressure Cookery For
Every Meal, Ruth Berolzheimer, Culinary Arts Institute, 1949