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Lactation Information and Discussion

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From:
Jo-Anne Elder <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Lactation Information and Discussion <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:51:12 -0300
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Morgan writes:
"This mother is not only taking charge on her own terms, she's resisting their power when they object."
and Susan echoed: 
"Attitude may be the biggest barrier to breastfeeding -- on all sides. This is such a story of power. It is the politics that first drew me to advocate for breastfeeding. and I still see breastfeeding as the ultimate feminist issue."

Thank you for writing this! It's always such a relief to see breastfeeding framed as a feminist issue. Not all second-wave feminists discussed it this way, and now women who are beginning their families have been left on their own to figure out how to birth, nurture, and mother with those bodies that seem to have become sites of disease and exploitation, as though they are "unmothered" or severed from their mother-body. It's bad enough to think about what the women who are making negative comments about (public) (sustained) (any) breastfeeding to clients or strangers are doing; it's even scarier to think about those women being mothers to a generation of women beginning to breastfeed. Thank goodness daughters of retired LLL Leaders are here to remind me that women who are sad and critical are not going to succeed in disempowering all of them! 

If anyone would like to add more comments about helping young women see breastfeeding as feminist *and* transformative and life-giving, please share your comments... I'll collect them, credit you, and share them with my women's studies students next year. We've done some healing by looking at their feelings about their own mothers, and now I want them to look at their own mothering in a different way. 

Jo-Anne 

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