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Book Cover
E-book
Author Martucci, Jessica L., author.

Title Back to the breast : natural motherhood and breastfeeding in America / Jessica L. Martucci
Published Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2015
©2015

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Description 1 online resource (292 pages)
Series Online access with DDA: Askews (Medicine)
Contents Introduction: why breastfeeding? -- Make room for mother: the "psy"-entific ideology of natural motherhood -- Frustration and failure: the scientific management of breastfeeding "Motherhood raised to the Nth degree": breastfeeding in the postwar years -- Maternal expectations: new mothers, nurses, and breastfeeding -- Our bodies, our nature: breastfeeding, the environment, and feminism -- Woman's right, mother's milk: the nature and technology of breast milk feeding -- Epilogue. Natural motherhood redux
Summary After decades of decline during the twentieth century, breastfeeding rates began to rise again in the 1970s, a rebound that has continued to the present. While it would be easy to see this reemergence as simply part of the naturalism movement of the '70s, Jessica Martucci reveals here that the true story is more complicated. Despite the widespread acceptance and even advocacy of formula feeding by many in the medical establishment throughout the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, a small but vocal minority of mothers, drawing upon emerging scientific and cultural ideas about maternal instinct, infant development, and connections between the body and mind, pushed back against both hospital policies and cultural norms by breastfeeding their children. As Martucci shows, their choices helped ideologically root a "back to the breast" movement within segments of the middle-class, college-educated population as early as the 1950s. That movement-in which the personal and political were inextricably linked-effectively challenged midcentury norms of sexuality, gender, and consumption, and articulated early environmental concerns about chemical and nuclear contamination of foods, bodies, and breast milk. In its groundbreaking chronicle of the breastfeeding movement, Back to the Breast provides a welcome and vital account of what it has meant, and what it means today, to breastfeed in modern America
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Breastfeeding -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Breastfeeding promotion -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Infants -- Nutrition -- United States.
Motherhood -- United States
Maternal and infant welfare -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Mothers -- United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
Health promotion.
Breast Feeding -- history
Breast Feeding -- trends
Health Promotion
Maternal Behavior -- history
FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS -- General.
Health promotion
Breastfeeding
Breastfeeding promotion
Infants -- Nutrition
Maternal and infant welfare
Motherhood
Mothers -- Social life and customs
Stillen
Säugling
Kleinkind
Ernährung
SUBJECT United States
Subject United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780226288178
022628817X