In response to Kathy Dettwyler's letter regarding b/f and work:

Kathy claims that "[t]he real questions are not "Should all mothers stay
home with their
children" or "Should mothers feel fine going back to work" or even "What
percentage of mothers REALLY need to work to survive economically?" or "What
constitutes a good daycare situation?"

The real questions are "Why do we live in -- and accept and promote -- a
society where work and breastfeeding (and childrearing in general) are
incompatible?"

She goes on to say "Why do we not DEMAND more flexibility for women's work
so that it is compatible with child care?"…We do not have to accept the
artificial dichotomy that work is "public" and childcare is "private" or
domestic.  But most women do accept it, and buy
into the idea that work women do in the home isn't really work because it
isn't given an economic wage, and that work women do in reproduction
(childbearing and rearing) isn't as important as work women do in production
(wage labor).

Kathy's message is that American women do not have to "buy into" these
realities. To me, this seems another version of blaming women / mothers
rather than recognising that there are some very real and structural
problem in terms of the public / private divide which various women's
groups and, sometimes, policy makers are nevertheless attempting to
overcome through lobbying for provisions for maternity / parental leave and
"family-friendly" workplace policies. However, this is no easy task as,
here, in New Zealand we have no paid maternity leave or parental leave,
like our US counterparts. 

Furthermore (and with all due respect), it is all very well arguing that
women ought not to "buy into the idea that work women do in the home isn't
really work because it isn't given an economic wage", particularly when one
is talking from the perspective of being in one of the more privileged and
status conscious positions in the world, that is, a professor in a United
States university. It must be easy to ignore the perception that work in
the home and childrearing is not real work from such a vantage point.
Morever, in terms of paid work, most women  are not employed in such
positions but rather in occupations such as sales and services and clerical
work, where bosses take less kindly to a child or the pumping or expressing
of breastmilk in the workplace, which is anyway, in most instances, not
conducive to it. It is not surprising that Naomi Bar-Yam found in her 1997
study of women's experiences with lactation in the corporate workplace that
having an office was a substantial aid to combining breastfeeding / pumping
breastmilk and paid employment. Moreover, in an article published in 1997
by a United States journal entitled Feminist Economics (vol. 3, no. 3), I
noted several studies which indicated that  professional or
semi-professional occupational status / position was an important factor in
enabling women to combine breastfeeding and paid work. This was generally
attributed to the greater control and flexibility experienced by such
workers. While much of the "how-to-combine-breastfeeding -and- paid-work"
literature discusses the need to be assertive with one's boss etc., lets
face it, this only really works if you have employment skills that are not
so easy to replace. Presumably also, many professors are on tenure and thus
are more or less guaranteed that (even if they had to ask anyone to
undertake breastfeeding in the workplace), a fit of pique or assertion is
not going to be too costly in the career stakes. 

Kathy notes that "We do not have to accept the artificial dichotomy that
work is "public" and
childcare is "private" or domestic". I suggest that we do not need to agree
with this dichotomy but it is certainly very real for most women,
particularly those without breastfeeding breaks, paid maternity leave and /
or "family-friendly" workplaces. 

Lastly, I think to compare the experiences of women working in various
so-called "developing" countries with those in most industrialised or
"Western" nations, is dubious. Trawling the rice paddies with baby on back
is slightly different to going to work at  General Motors in Detroit or
similar cities in countries such as New Zealand, Australia  and the United
Kingdom. Moreover, my own conversations with various women working in
policy making positions in the South Pacific suggests that women working in
offices in many of the islands have just as little scope for involving
their infants in clerical life as women anywhere else. 

Finally, I am soon going, as part of WABA,  to Geneva to the International
Labour Organization's revision of its Maternity Protection Convention,
which still remains unratified by many countries. One can only ask why
there continues to be such extensive lobbying for provisions such as
nursing breaks and maternity / parental leaves if  the problem exists
mainly in women's minds, as Kathy appears to suggest.

Best wishes

Judith Galtry, Department of Women's Studies, Wellington, New Zealand 

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