[From a longer article,  ARE BABY MANUALS PRIMERS IN CHILD CARE OR LESSONS
IN HISTORY?  by Dr John Collee, Copyright 1996,  Guardian Newspapers
Limited, pub. February  18, 1996]  Apologies to Kathy Dettwyler in advance.
;-)

    [...the Victorian period] has to be a low
point in the history of childhood. Breast-feeding was supported by both science
and the religion of the day but, ironically, in the very attempt to popularise
it many of the manuals written by doctors served only to put women off by
devising complicated techniques for the whole process.

    Throughout the 19th century the advertising of baby foods and milk
substitutes assured their popularity despite the primitive state of bottle
feeding equipment. Old-fashioned teats of vulcanised rubber 'smelled disgusting,
stiffened after repeated use and perished internally'; the alternatives were
teats made of chamois leather or, most unappealing of all, the pickled teat of a
young calf. The notion of sterilising these things was alien to most people "
which may partly account for the huge rise in infant mortality towards the end
of Victoria's reign.

    The typically Victorian evils of prudishness and over-rigorous discipline
left European babies shell shocked till well after the First World War. Those
women who attempted to  breast-feed  were encumbered by ridiculous contraptions
such as the 'anti-embarrassment device' for nursing mothers, patented in 1910,
which consisted of a harness cupping the breasts, with rubber tube extensions
over the nipples and a teat at the end for the baby.

    When breast-feeding did get under way again, with the Mothercraft Movement
of the 1920s and 30s, it was still constrained by military-style feeding
schedules that probably had their roots in the disciplinarian regimes of large
orphanages. These rigid schedules led to 'a generation of hungry, thwarted
babies' whose self-esteem was permanently damaged by the long night-time
sessions of supposedly therapeutic crying. (You'll note that, until quite

recently, this particular generation of babies was running our country.) It was
high time for a libertarian counterblast and it came with women writers such as
Margaret Ribble, ahead of her time in 1943, who championed close physical
contact of mother and child in the early months and advocated prolonged
breast-feeding....

Arly Helm                                       [log in to unmask]
(MS, Nutrition & Food Sciences, CLE, IBCLC; LC for IHC)