The social pressures on women, to control and separate their 
relationships with their babies and children, is massive.  Was then, 
still is.  The Victorian upper/middle class agenda, to 'improve' the 
conditions of the 'deserving' working classes has been, and still is, a 
relentless force on mothers and babies.  From the genuine concerns on 
over crowding, lack of clean water, and disease running rife in 
communities, less genuine concerns on social standing and 'decency' 
worked.  Babies must not share beds.  Women with poor nutrition 
standards must be given 'scientific' milk to feed their babies.  
Cleanliness and being hard working at all costs, must be instilled as 
Godly virtues in the unwashed.

Working class women must be temples of decent and clean living, and not 
touch alcohol, or go to pubs, and their children must be clean, quiet, 
biddable and respectable.  Clean doorstep = clean family = 'deserving'.  
The template still stands in our attack on 'chavs' and asbo scum.

Working class woman have always be criticised for spending too much time 
with their children, and being too indulgent of them.  I've been told 
this past month of someone studying the criticism, and stamping out, of 
extended breastfeeding in the slums of the East End, at the turn of the 
last Century. Communities now being criticised for formula feeding.

 The 1950s NHS drive saw legions of mothers being told their milk was 
too poor to feed their babies, and mothers informed they must use the 
wonder fluids of the formula that was being made to use up a surplus 
from the dairy industry.  My own husband, born in 1955, was taken off 
his mother's breast by the Doctor, who examined her milk after asking 
her to express a few drops, and declared it "like dishwater".  She was 
told to formula feed to save his life: something which haunts him 
through his life of epic illness and subsequent life threatening sleep 
apnoea.

Industrialisation has always required mothers and babies to split, to 
provide workforce.  The issue during the war was to bring out the more 
affluent women, protected by male wage-earning from the need to work: 
massive campaigns has to be undertaken to ensure these women were not 
stained with the stigma attached to previous generations of women too 
poor to stay home, who HAD to work.  Likewise, massive campaigns then 
took place to return them back to home and hearth, afterwards.  (We're 
in my specialist area here - anyone has a chance to do so, I'd 
recommended watching a very accurate on social history war move, made in 
1943 - 'Millions Like Us' by Launder & Gilliat.  Lays out the class 
agenda on 'working woman' extremely clearly, in the war context.  Also, 
damn good movie!)

Social engineering positions the wife as more important a role than the 
mother.  A woman separated from her baby is more easily controlled, as 
is the child.

Combine this with epic stigma on feeding in public spaces.... and add in 
huge profits to me made from the industry of separating mothers from 
their children... it's no wonder we are in the state we are in.  Decent 
woman do not sleep with their babies, breastfeed in public, or argue 
back.   They also understand the needs of their children come after the 
needs of the wage-earners.  Reliable formula in cleanable bottles is, 
and was,  a massive vector of social control and engineering.

:-(

Morgan Gallagher

heather wrote:
>
>
> I wonder if this is correct? I think there may be a strand of thinking 
> that says 'this is free so it must be good and no one wants to miss 
> out on a free gift' but I don't know that we can say this is the 
> primary reason why mothers took up the offer.
>
> During WWII, for the first ever time in the UK, in all industrial 
> areas, there were state-run nurseries offering free childcare - there 
> had to be, to enable mothers to take the place of men in the workplace 
> and munitions factories, as from 1939-1940 the majority of men under 
> about 40 were serving in the forces (call up ( = 'the draft") happened 
> very early on in WWII (they'd learnt from WWI that voluntary sign up 
> was a slow way to build  an army, and for this war they needed a navy 
> and an airforce, too).  This meant separating mothers from 
> babies....ergo, National Dried Milk. It was not to ensure 'nourishment 
> in times of hardship'.

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