I should clarify exactly what Naomi Wolf said in her book about LLL (pages 268 - 269):

"The group of neonatal activists that my friends and I came to call "the Lactation Fascists" - La Leche League, which believes in lactation the way some people believe in redemption - sees nursing as a moral imperative.  I found such activists to be terribly vexing, partly because it was just not reasonable for most of the women I knew to nurse the way that the Milk Missionaries wanted them to.
Yet in a world truly of mothers' making, these activists' passion could seem, in many ways, justified. In the United States, only about half of mothers breast-feed their babies at all, and by the time the bagby is six months old, the percentage is down to one in five.  That pattern was reflected in the nursing decisions of most of the women I knew.  Though the American Academy of Pediatirics says that babies should ideally be nursed for a year, only 6 percent of American mothers are still breastfeeding by their baby's first birthday.
In America, where many women have to go back to work full-time after three months of unpaid leave, ordinary nursing rhythms are a prohibitive luxury.  A talmudic proverb holds, "The cow needs to suckle as much as the calf needs to suck."  The anguish many new mothers must feel, who want to nurse and yet must return to work, may be as much biological as it is psychological.  Babies are biologically designed to nurse, of course, and new mothers are biologically oriented toward wanting to respond.
Mothers and babies who are nursing are like one continually interacting, merged organism."

And so on...  She does seems to "get it", and makes arguements for long leaves, flexible work scheduels, on-site day care, family-friendly public areas, neighborhood co-operative family centres, all to accomodate parents and children staying near to each other.
Please do not decide to dismiss this book and her arguements because of this one paragraph.  She really does argue for the same things we are argueing for.  She may have not "raised the bar" for breastfeeding as far as many of us would like, but she is ahead of most people in general society.

I cannot speak for the author based on her one brief reference to LLL, but perhaps I can understand her frustration with them.   While I respect that LLL is almost singularly responsible for the revival of breastfeeding in America, I do feel that they "dropped the ball" when it came to REALLY advocating for breastfeeding rights.  I understand their policy of not being political or "mixing causes" so as to always be available for mother-to-mother support.  But in not establishing an "arms-length" group to organize women to advocate for their rights, they have missed a great opportunity.

So perhaps I can theorize why Naomi and her friends might be angry with LLL.   LLL will tell you how to pump in order to combine working and bfing, but not how to advocate for your breastfeeding rights.  (I say this, because I was told that they would not distribute my "Moms for Milk" advocacy newsletter to LLL members at meetings).  No one at LLL meetings ever directed me to our local breastfeeding coalition, even though at meetings I was obviously very vocal and angry - my issues were not one of physical lactation management, but of societal and employment discrimination.

So to these women (Naomi) who are used to acting to get what they need, to hear LLL tell them to nurse as long as possible and that going back to work need not be a reason to wean, and giving tips about pumping and nursing, without helping them to organize and advocate for what they need from their employers, must sound like our mothers of years ago telling us not to wear short skirts so we wouldn't be raped, rather than organizing to work to end violence towards women.

I just think about how many thousands of women that haved been helped by LLL over the years, and wonder if their names have been kept and if they had been somehow encouraged to organize and act together as a political group - where would we be now?

Janice Reynolds
Consumer Representative, Breastfeeding Committee for Canada
Founder, Moms For Milk Breastfeeding Consumer Advocacy Network

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