The marketing gurus seem to have realised that it's women who are the key influencers in the family.
Women buy the groceries. They feed the kids and the husband, etc. They're the ones interested in promoting 'good health'. At least that was the case when I was younger. Maybe it's different now.
But I can't help thinking that, in the Garden, Satan went for Eve not Adam when he sought to exert his influence over both.
I went through a phase of collecting old mother care books and while I don't have the ones you have featured here; they are all fairly similar. Underlying most of them are two key concepts: that we women need "instruction" around caring for our babies and that good care means we need to be buying something. Instinctively responding to babies and breastfeeding them when they ask is never going to cut it under patriarchal capitalism.
It was bad enough during the eras when women were expected to know that our place was in the home (I love those Good Housekeeping to do lists from the 1950s on how to keep your husband happy), but as economies shifted and women were told that they needed to be earning a wage (on top of running a home), this has only got worse. Because the less time we spend with our babies and children, the less we really know them as people in their own right, leaving us reliant on outside advice where previously we could have relied on ourselves to appropriately respond to their needs.
The whole thing is exacerbated by the differing socialization that girls and boys are subjected to. "Being kind" and always compromising is for girls, and boldly forging your own path is for boys. No wonder women feel the need to outsource their mothering to corporations. Although if the outcome is less than ideal, it is women/mothers who will get the blame and carry the guilt, while the profit makers just roll on.
Yes, yes, yes to all of this! I especially loved your point about not knowing our children as full people the less we are with them, it is a big reason I am choosing to homeschool at least through elementary school (for transparency though, my 13 year old did start in a private school this year). The socialization point as well, these marketing agencies know this and take full advantage of it, which is why I think it is all the more imperative for us to be on high alert as to how these things are impacting us.
Brilliant article! All of it resonates. I remember my Mum telling me that she was told by doctors to put me straight on formula when I was a baby. Amazing how quickly marketing can be adopted as expert advice. This is a great reminder to stay discerning.
Thank you! And yes, depending on when you were born, that was pretty standard for a good while in hospitals. They even gave women injections to stop milk production before they left the hospital as a matter of standard of care.
As a nurse, my mind was BLOWN when you brought up the point of all the BS that is passed down to us and is just accepted… I guarantee you if healthcare was male-dominated there would be more pushback. But it SHOULDN’T be that way.
I love reading your work and thank you for being a nurse ❤️
As a history teacher, you are right about the role of the Industrial Revolution here and the move from production to consumption. But what about the role of wet nurses throughout history? It’s not particularly uncommon for those women with means. I enjoyed breastfeeding (although I always needed extra milk from formula due to lower weight gain). But it seems women have opted out of it for one reason or another since time immemorial. Hunter gatherer women raise children communally and babies are held by dozens of people per day!
I think wet nursing is a very important part of our history, and it is important for various reasons. It kept babies alive, it was also done as unpaid labor which of course raises questions of ethics, it was also done willingly as a matter of necessity amongst groups of women, and in the era before baby formula was completely known and available—often doctors told higher class women of means that they were too “delicate” to nurse and couldn’t and in a way, breastfeeding was stolen from them while they simultaneously outsourced the act in often not very ethical ways. So it’s complicated.
Overall, I think wet nursing, when done as a matter of survival and in accordance with the wishes of the women involved, can be a really important and truthfully, beautiful act of resilience and service. This all ties into the fact that hunter gatherer babies had many alloparents.
If you are just asking my opinion on this, I think that falls into the category of necessity for survival and an act of service. I don’t personally find it ethically tricky in the way I find things like surrogacy ethically problematic because what is being sold is substance for the sake of human survival—not humans themselves the way a surrogacy-born baby is. I also don’t think it can be fairly compared to something like prostitution. In all of these situations, the female body is involved, but the body itself isn’t being sold in wet nursing, it is the milk. All of this said—if women were turning to this act out of total financial desperation and their own babies were suffering as a result, which surely was often the case, we again find ourselves in a very ethically messy place.
It’s not so much that I disagree with you. You’ve made so many good points. But you are also romanticizing the premodern world and filtering out information, such as paid wet nursing, that doesn’t fit your view. You made many great points about unhealthy processed food, but I bet you’re also familiar with the sky high child mortality rates of the premodern world. We do live longer now.
I suppose the bit about breastfeeding in this essay was such a small part of it that I don’t really see it that way—it’s just an example of the overall message on marketing, and being that infant formula of the time was actually very harmful to lots of babies, it wasn’t truthfully benefiting them in the way that breastfeeding would have. Did some survive because of it? Yes. But we have to see the difference between surviving and thriving, and that applies to today as well. Yes, formula keeps babies alive but it is also associated with higher rates of obesity, asthma and food allergies, and also for preemies, with deathly necrotizing enterocolitis. For this reason, I don’t think we have formula to thank for longer lifespan, perhaps higher infant survival rate at this point in time, but not longer lifespan as it is overall something that has health risks involved due to the ingredients. I wasn’t trying to romanticize anything but not including the story of wet nursing here, I simply didn’t go there with this essay because breastfeeding really wasn’t the focus of the essay if that makes sense. That would have to be its own piece for sure, the topic is vast!
That’s very fair. I confess I didn’t read the entire thing before I started commenting. However, virtually all babies were formula fed in the 1950s and food allergies were heard of. I think there might be another factor.
Totally get it! I did share that portion after all 😂 the book I quoted from is an amazing resource on all of this if you are interested too. Your point about food allergies is interesting but I do think the ingredients in formula were much simpler then and also the way agriculture practices have changed, especially in reference to GMOs and different herbicides and pesticides on both things like soy and corn which are either directly in the formula or are fed to the cows whose milk makes up the bulk of the formula. So I do think that likely is a factor as well.
My grandma got called a “cow” by her friends for choosing to breastfeed my dad and his siblings. She breastfed them, anyway. This would’ve been in the 40s/50s. I’m grateful for her, wish I’d known her better (passed away when I was 14).
Too much here to comment on! But geeez I appreciate the way you think. So much.
Thank you Haley! I felt like this one is a little all over the place so this is encouraging 😂♥️
The marketing gurus seem to have realised that it's women who are the key influencers in the family.
Women buy the groceries. They feed the kids and the husband, etc. They're the ones interested in promoting 'good health'. At least that was the case when I was younger. Maybe it's different now.
But I can't help thinking that, in the Garden, Satan went for Eve not Adam when he sought to exert his influence over both.
I don’t think it is different now, I think this is a fair assessment.
Another great post Emily, thanks!
I went through a phase of collecting old mother care books and while I don't have the ones you have featured here; they are all fairly similar. Underlying most of them are two key concepts: that we women need "instruction" around caring for our babies and that good care means we need to be buying something. Instinctively responding to babies and breastfeeding them when they ask is never going to cut it under patriarchal capitalism.
It was bad enough during the eras when women were expected to know that our place was in the home (I love those Good Housekeeping to do lists from the 1950s on how to keep your husband happy), but as economies shifted and women were told that they needed to be earning a wage (on top of running a home), this has only got worse. Because the less time we spend with our babies and children, the less we really know them as people in their own right, leaving us reliant on outside advice where previously we could have relied on ourselves to appropriately respond to their needs.
The whole thing is exacerbated by the differing socialization that girls and boys are subjected to. "Being kind" and always compromising is for girls, and boldly forging your own path is for boys. No wonder women feel the need to outsource their mothering to corporations. Although if the outcome is less than ideal, it is women/mothers who will get the blame and carry the guilt, while the profit makers just roll on.
Yes, yes, yes to all of this! I especially loved your point about not knowing our children as full people the less we are with them, it is a big reason I am choosing to homeschool at least through elementary school (for transparency though, my 13 year old did start in a private school this year). The socialization point as well, these marketing agencies know this and take full advantage of it, which is why I think it is all the more imperative for us to be on high alert as to how these things are impacting us.
Brilliant article! All of it resonates. I remember my Mum telling me that she was told by doctors to put me straight on formula when I was a baby. Amazing how quickly marketing can be adopted as expert advice. This is a great reminder to stay discerning.
Thank you! And yes, depending on when you were born, that was pretty standard for a good while in hospitals. They even gave women injections to stop milk production before they left the hospital as a matter of standard of care.
As a nurse, my mind was BLOWN when you brought up the point of all the BS that is passed down to us and is just accepted… I guarantee you if healthcare was male-dominated there would be more pushback. But it SHOULDN’T be that way.
I love reading your work and thank you for being a nurse ❤️
I agree—it would look so different. Thank you as well!!
For LLL they keep asking me to attend an 'anti bias training' and I'm like nah
Lol I want you to do it just for the intel 😅
As a history teacher, you are right about the role of the Industrial Revolution here and the move from production to consumption. But what about the role of wet nurses throughout history? It’s not particularly uncommon for those women with means. I enjoyed breastfeeding (although I always needed extra milk from formula due to lower weight gain). But it seems women have opted out of it for one reason or another since time immemorial. Hunter gatherer women raise children communally and babies are held by dozens of people per day!
I think wet nursing is a very important part of our history, and it is important for various reasons. It kept babies alive, it was also done as unpaid labor which of course raises questions of ethics, it was also done willingly as a matter of necessity amongst groups of women, and in the era before baby formula was completely known and available—often doctors told higher class women of means that they were too “delicate” to nurse and couldn’t and in a way, breastfeeding was stolen from them while they simultaneously outsourced the act in often not very ethical ways. So it’s complicated.
Overall, I think wet nursing, when done as a matter of survival and in accordance with the wishes of the women involved, can be a really important and truthfully, beautiful act of resilience and service. This all ties into the fact that hunter gatherer babies had many alloparents.
What about women who did it for pay? Plenty did in the premodern world.
If you are just asking my opinion on this, I think that falls into the category of necessity for survival and an act of service. I don’t personally find it ethically tricky in the way I find things like surrogacy ethically problematic because what is being sold is substance for the sake of human survival—not humans themselves the way a surrogacy-born baby is. I also don’t think it can be fairly compared to something like prostitution. In all of these situations, the female body is involved, but the body itself isn’t being sold in wet nursing, it is the milk. All of this said—if women were turning to this act out of total financial desperation and their own babies were suffering as a result, which surely was often the case, we again find ourselves in a very ethically messy place.
It’s not so much that I disagree with you. You’ve made so many good points. But you are also romanticizing the premodern world and filtering out information, such as paid wet nursing, that doesn’t fit your view. You made many great points about unhealthy processed food, but I bet you’re also familiar with the sky high child mortality rates of the premodern world. We do live longer now.
I suppose the bit about breastfeeding in this essay was such a small part of it that I don’t really see it that way—it’s just an example of the overall message on marketing, and being that infant formula of the time was actually very harmful to lots of babies, it wasn’t truthfully benefiting them in the way that breastfeeding would have. Did some survive because of it? Yes. But we have to see the difference between surviving and thriving, and that applies to today as well. Yes, formula keeps babies alive but it is also associated with higher rates of obesity, asthma and food allergies, and also for preemies, with deathly necrotizing enterocolitis. For this reason, I don’t think we have formula to thank for longer lifespan, perhaps higher infant survival rate at this point in time, but not longer lifespan as it is overall something that has health risks involved due to the ingredients. I wasn’t trying to romanticize anything but not including the story of wet nursing here, I simply didn’t go there with this essay because breastfeeding really wasn’t the focus of the essay if that makes sense. That would have to be its own piece for sure, the topic is vast!
That’s very fair. I confess I didn’t read the entire thing before I started commenting. However, virtually all babies were formula fed in the 1950s and food allergies were heard of. I think there might be another factor.
Totally get it! I did share that portion after all 😂 the book I quoted from is an amazing resource on all of this if you are interested too. Your point about food allergies is interesting but I do think the ingredients in formula were much simpler then and also the way agriculture practices have changed, especially in reference to GMOs and different herbicides and pesticides on both things like soy and corn which are either directly in the formula or are fed to the cows whose milk makes up the bulk of the formula. So I do think that likely is a factor as well.
My grandma got called a “cow” by her friends for choosing to breastfeed my dad and his siblings. She breastfed them, anyway. This would’ve been in the 40s/50s. I’m grateful for her, wish I’d known her better (passed away when I was 14).