>Heather writes: "He [Mozart] wrote to his father saying he wanted his
>children brought up on water[apparently he meant gruel, or bread in
>water/beer, not literally just water], as his parents did for him and his
>sibs (he and his sister were the only surviving children among seven
>siblings)."
>
>Well, I say disrespectfully, his parents didn't have a great record on that
>front, since Wolfgang Amadeus only made it to 35. His sister seems to have
>outdone them all, dying at 78. Not exactly a convincing argument for the
>gruel route.


My puzzlement remains.

I understand that mothers can be persuaded by whatever stupid 
(usually patriarchal) idea that happens to be around at the time that 
breastfeeding is not good to do.

Currently (by which I mean in the past 75 years or so) the stupid 
idea has been that a synthesised factory-made substitute based on 
another animal's milk and given in a calibrated bottle is 'better' 
('because you can see how much the baby's getting' , 'because it's 
got all the vitamins and minerals in it', 'because it's always the 
same' yadda yadda yadda), backed up with some extraordinary notions 
related to modesty and body consciousness.

In other times and other places, the stupid idea has been about rich 
women being too delicate to do this vulgar common thing; that women 
need to be fertile and sexually available as soon as possible after 
birth;  that serial pregnancy is part of the Almighty's wish for 
womankind and bf interferes with this; that women of a certain class 
should not have to be bothered with the nuisance of looking after 
infants because they're needed as decoration for the next palace 
Ball; that babies should be toughened up by being separated from 
their mothers and farmed out. And so on.

But how was it that mothers *and*  fathers got into a situation where 
they knew their babies were not just vulnerable but had a high chance 
of *dying* as a result of these stupid ideas?  Were they all in 
denial?

Where does that fit into the human psyche? Where does that fit in to 
the need to procreate one's genes? What does that mindset say about 
human relationships? What does that mindset *do* to human 
relationships?  One can speculate, and indeed there is a discipline 
called psychohistory which looks at this whole area and links it all 
up....warrior societies and brutal cultures grow up and thrive when 
early human relationships are poor or neglected.

Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK
-- 

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