My husband is the one who reads the papers and brings home the interesting articles.  So he was
the first one to pick up Barbara Walter's comments about breastfeeding on the plane.  I think he
has a good point about when it is appropriate to take an issue public.  He pointed out that she
made a public statement in the media to a wide audience.  She is an influential figure who has the
power to make some women feel uncomfortable about nursing.  This really demands a similar
response to reach the initial audience that was influenced by her comments.  As we saw, the
nurse-in had its intended goal of putting the issue into the public eye and it was portrayed in a
very favorable light.

It seems as if management at FAO Schwarz responded favorably to everyone that contacted them.
Hence this was not a top-down policy, but a young employee who hadn't thought about the issue
much.  Had they responded differently there are any number of approaches that could have been
applied.  The person I spoke to and I had a really good chat.  Since it was readily apparent that it
was a younger employee - I shared with him my experiences when we had to run a sexual
sensitivity training for a group of Ministry of Health officials who came from diverse countries
including Pakistan.  The poor Pakistani men, all of whom had never set foot outside of Pakistan,
were all greated at the airport by the boss's secretary, dressed in a short skirt and a low cut top
--- which was totally inappropriate for them so they had a rough introduction to our culture
immediately.  The group of MOH officials, including the Pakistani men, went through the
sensitivity training which covered such topics as date rape and how to tell if a woman is really
giving you an invitation or not.  They did fine and adjusted well.  The incident which spurred all
this was an ugly incident the previous year with one of the trainees from Zimbabwe with another
Zimbabwean woman, a woman from Bolivia and finally a woman from Indonesia.  My boss
attributed his behavior to cultural differences and took no action until the guy sent the woman
from Indonesia to the hospital with an attack of high blood pressure from the stress of dealing
with his totally inapporpriate behavior.  Knowing the women from Zimbabwe quite well, I knew all
along that this man's behavior was definitely not within their cultural norm.  The man was a jerk in
any culture.  This got a chuckle of relief out of the management at FAO Schwarz.  So, they will go
on my list of places that have made an effort to make it friendly for women to nurse when I do my
prenatal classes.

Best regards, Susan Burger

Hopefully I'll have a chance to call 311 about the bus ads in Manhattan portraying sleeping with
your baby as a dangerous act, especially if you use drugs, are overweight, etc and take them to
task for not putting the breastfeeding part into the picture of reducing risk of SIDS.

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