Dear all:

A few have sent emails off list and so I wanted to clarify completely about what I found interesting
about Orson Scott Card's comments about nursing.  First, I think its unusual for any man to
actually have written a book where he clearly put some thought into the nursing relationship
between mother and child.  In Sarah - he talks about the nursing to the two year mark - so he
clearly understand the importance of this duration.  So, when I made the comment that he made a
modern interpretation of a woman wanting to have some freedom from her infant when she was
an older woman, I did not think that had anything whatsoever to do with his being Mormon or that
he was antinursing - just that he may not have fully thought through the complexities of how
women feel about nursing and our modern feelings in the US are influenced by our current culture
which may be different from that historical period.

He may very well have wrote the book because he found this to be a fascinating period of biblical
history and he clearly is very interested in the intriguing family dynamics of this period.  His
comments about nursing can all be seen in this light and overall I think its great that he even
considered it.  It does not sound from his writing that he is putting his interpretation into the
book based on any sort of current thoughts of his own Church - it sounds more as if he is basing
his interpretations on personal experiences with nursing.

In Rebekah, he speaks about her rejection of the idea of having a wetnurse to nurse the twins
Jacob and Esau because she feels she has two breasts that God gave her and she should have
plenty of milk.  Then he talks about her feelings about Esau being shaped by his style of nursing.
I interpret his descriptions of Esau and how he nursed as Esau having a lousy suck and
compensating for it by clamping down.  His interpretation of this is that it may have shaped her
feelings for Esau in comparison to Jacob who nurses gently.  I have no idea if he really meant this
as a metaphore for Esau outward appearance later in life as the physically stronger of the two (and
here his apparently stronger suck while nursing which may actually have been that jaw clamp to
compensate for low oral tone) while in the end Jacob, the apparently gentler of the two, ends up
being the stronger in reality in the end.  Who knows what was in his mind when he wrote it, but it
clearly figured in his whole interpretation of the family dynamics which I find very interesting.

As far as Orson Scott Card, what I find interesting about his being clearly very religious, is that the
press so often portrays the battle between science and religion.  Here is a man who is fascinated
with science and science fiction, devoted to his own religion (albeit he makes it very clear that he
is not a biblical literalist) and he successfully managed to come to terms and meld his love of his
own religion with his love of science.  In the process of his books, he really looks into the
mundane family dynamics that we all encounter in day to day life and if you read his sections on
nursing, it seems as if at least one or more women in his family or among friends have nursed
children for him to have made the observations he has made about these relationships.

So, even though I think he sees the nursing relationship through modern eyes - he clearly sees it
as the normal way to feed infants and important enough in his male view of the world to include in
his books.  How many men think to include how nursing can shape family dynamics of
historical importance in a book?  I think he talks about the nursing dynamics far more than was
discussed in the Red Tent.


Best regards, Susan E. Burger, MHS, PhD, IBCLC

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