Nursing also is a learned behavior, and one that is not always easy to master. Great apes, whose milk is so compositionally similar to ours, must also learn by observing others the proper techniques for suckling their young, but humans are dunces compared to gorillas. We need tutoring from our obstetricians, midwives, and birthing instructors. We need lactation consultants and La Leche League crisis counselors. We have a hard time sitting still, and nursing requires patience and relaxation. Stress hormones can disrupt the flow of milk. Our nipples may crack and bleed from the pull of the infant's mouth, and though the pain is supposed to go away in a few days, for some it lasts much longer. Some women love breastfeeding their babies. They talk of how good it feels, how close to orgasm they come while nursing. They might be away from their baby, but the mere recollection of the sensation of suckling sends a warm rush across their body, and their milk starts to flow—embarrassingly, if they are at work or in a meeting. They fall in love with their suckling infant and think of nothing and nobody else.
Other women never get the knack of joy. The baby cries and rejects the breast. The women keep at it, but they don't find their rhythm. Their milk never feels as though it's flowing. The baby gains weight slowly. Pediatricians are now questioning whether the fast weight gain seen in bottle-fed babies is the appropriate scale by which to measure natural growth patterns, but still, the baby seems perpetually hungry and the mother feels perpetually inadequate. She must go back to work, and she hasn't mastered breastfeeding, or breast pumping, or satisfying her baby or herself. She dislikes breastfeeding and she doesn't want to do it, but she feels guilty, bottomlessly guilty, at the thought of not nursing. She is not allowed to say how she feels. There are neuropeptides in milk, after all, and immune cells, and lactoferrin, and how could a mother ask her child to forgo the perfect food, the better part of herself? Maternal guilt is impossible to assuage. A female primatologist told me she blamed herself for her child's allergies, because she only breastfed the child for six months.
"The act of suckling a child, like a sexual act, may be tense, physically painful, charged with cultural feelings of inadequacy and guilt," wrote Adrienne Rich. "Or, like a sexual act, it can be a physically delicious, elementally soothing experience, filled with a tender sensuality."
Breastfeeding your baby is natural, yet women have long done otherwise, and sometimes it is hard to say whether they chose not to breastfeed or the choice was forced upon them. Wet-nursing is an ancient profession, and among the few open exclusively to women. Wet nurses were so common at certain times of history that they were subject to competition and had to advertise their services. In Renaissance Florence, groups of wet nurses gathered at markets and festivals and sang lacto-jingles: "Always when the baby cries/We feel our milk returning/Acting with energy and speed/We do our duty." Expectant parents consulted how-to books on the traits to seek in a wet nurse. "The ideal wet nurse should be amiable, cheerful, lively and good-humored, with strong nerves; not fretful, peevish, quarrelsome, sad or timorous, and free from passions and worries," according to one treatise from sixteenth-century England. "Finally, a potential wet nurse must like children." Though for much of history only the wealthy could afford to hire wet nurses, as always the habits of the upper classes trickled down to the lower, and by the seventeenth century half or more of all women were sending their babies to other nipples for nourishment. High-priced wet nurses shipped their own babies off to cheaper wet nurses, to preserve their personal milk supply for professional use. In 1780, according to Marilyn Yalom, as few as 10 percent of all Parisian babies were nursed in their own homes.
Nor was wet-nursing the only alternative to maternal breastfeeding. We think of infant formula as a relatively new invention, another canker of advanced capitalism, but humans have long fed infants on the milk of other mammals, or on liquid gruel and pulverized adult food. Some anthropologists have suggested that dairy animals such as the cow and the goat were originally domesticated to provide milk for babies. The babies may have suckled directly from the animal's teats, or they were fed with weaning cups, or through cow horns, or through nipples fashioned from leather. Clay bottles shaped like breasts have been found at several sites in Europe that date from the late Neolithic era, around 3500 B.C. Many of the infants fed on these substitutes for human milk died, either because they couldn't metabolize the cow's milk or because they contracted infections directly from the animals. According to church and county records of the eighteenth century, babies who were fed cow's milk through a cow's horn in certain parts of Germany and Scandinavia died of diarrhea at a much higher rate than infants in the same area who were breastfed. Nevertheless, the effort to circumvent breastfeeding, to shrug off the mammalian mantle, long predates Nestlé Corp., Ross Laboratories, and the formulas they hawk.
The question is, precisely who wished to avoid the lactational charge? In some cases, the husband demanded that his wife not breastfeed. Suckling ruined a beautiful bosom. A nursing breast was not his breast. He wanted her back to perform her wifely duties, that is, to sleep with him. Neither wives nor wet nurses were supposed to have intercourse while breastfeeding, for it was thought that breast milk was formed in the uterus from menstrual blood; medieval and Renaissance texts show a lacteal duct leading from the uterus to the breasts. Intercourse was thought to cause menstruation, which would then jeopardize or taint the flow of milk to the infant. There may also have been the observation that if a woman didn't breastfeed, she became pregnant again comparatively sooner. Men concerned with progeny and heirs wanted fruitful wives, and the less those wives lactated, the more they multiplied. By this calculation, the use of wet nurses in no way liberated women to possess themselves or pursue their fancies, but rather resulted in their spending that much more time pregnant.
Still, when political and medical tides turned and campaigns were initiated to encourage maternal breastfeeding, women, not men, were the target of the exhortations. In 1694, Mary Astell wrote A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, arguing that breastfeeding acted as a check on excessive pride. Women should not "think themselves too Good to perform what Nature requires, nor thro' Pride and Delicacy remit the poor little one to the care of a Foster Parent," she said. In the late eighteenth century, Europe was seized by a craze for in-home breastfeeding. Jean Jacques Rousseau attacked women who would not suckle their young as selfish, callous, and—that word again—unnatural. Linnaeus, celebrant of the mammary gland, condemned the practice of wet-nursing and proclaimed that mothers and infants both benefited from maternal suckling. Medical authorities warned of the dangers of entrusting infants to a stranger's breast, which might be feeding many mouths and satisfying none; and in fact, the rate of mortality among infants farmed out to wet nurses was quite high. Such treatises had a righteous, lecturing tone. "Let not husbands be deceived: let them not expect attachment from wives who, in neglecting to suckle their children, rend asunder the strongest ties in nature," wrote William Buchan in his 1769 Advice to Mothers. A woman who would not "discharge the duties of a mother" through the literal discharge of her breast "has no right to become a wife." More influential was William Cadogan, whose 1748 Essay upon Nursing went through several editions in Europe and America. He urged women to follow the laws of "unerring Nature," and claimed that breastfeeding was troublesome "only for want of proper Method; were it rightly managed, there would be much Pleasure in it, to every Woman that can prevail upon herself to give up a little of the Beauty of her Breast to feed her Offspring." Mothers needed the advice of medical men like himself, he said. "In my Opinion, this Business has been too long fatally left to the Management of Women who cannot be supposed to have proper knowledge to fit them for such a Task." Even Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, urged women to breastfeed, claiming that a husband will feel "more delight at seeing his child suckled by its mother, than the most artful wanton tricks could ever raise," the "wanton tricks" being the display of an unused bosom. The importunings of philosophers and physicians were bo
lstered by the power of the state. In 1793, the French government decreed that if a mother did not breastfeed her child, she would be ineligible for the eighteenth-century equivalent of welfare payments. A year later the German government went further, requiring all healthy women to nurse their young. By the early nineteenth century, motherly succor was a cult, and highborn women bragged of their commitment to breastfeeding.
Still, at least a few women expressed some ambivalence toward the elevation of the maternal mammary gland. In Belinda, an 1801 novel by the British writer Maria Edgeworth, a character named Lady Delacour tells her history to Belinda. Her first child was born dead, she said, because "I would not be kept prisoner" during pregnancy, nor would she cease her zealous pursuit of gaiety. A second starved to death in infancy: "It was the fashion in that time for fine mothers to suckle their own children.... There was a prodigious point made about the matter; a vast deal of sentiment and sympathy, and compliments and enquiries. But after the novelty was over, I became heartily sick of the business; and at the end of three months my poor child was sick too—I don't much like to think of it—it died."
After the eighteenth century, the practice of wet-nursing never regained popularity, but some of the same themes and counterthemes, the fall and rise of the mammary gland's reputation, have been recapitulated in the twentieth century, with the advent of infant formula. Again medical scientists and well-to-do women have led the way in the do-si-do, first by embracing formula as a scientifically designed product that equals and even surpasses breast milk in nutritiousness and purity, and then in rejecting formula as a pallid and possibly harmful substitute for human milk. In America, the oscillation has been extreme. Before 1930, most women breastfed their babies. By 1972, only 22 percent did, and then for just the first few weeks of life. Formula manufacturers must be held partly responsible for the mass acceptance of their wares. They have pushed their cans and powders relentlessly and often unscrupulously. To this day, they dole out formula samples in maternity wards, even as hospital nurses try to instruct new mothers in the art of breastfeeding.
Yet to say that women have been complete dupes of the formula industry is to assume that women are silly, passive, and gullible and that when allowed to choose freely, they will always choose to breastfeed for months or years. My mother bottle-fed her four children, because she tried breastfeeding but hated it, it was so painful. If she'd had more support and instruction, she says now, she would have tried harder. But my mother-in-law, a retired college dean who also bottle-fed her three children, said she did so because she didn't want to feel like a pair of udders, and she wouldn't do differently today. "Breastfeeding," she said, "was not for me."
Breastfeeding advocates have made spectacular progress, particularly among highly educated women, who now breastfeed their newborns at a rate of about 75 or 80 percent. Many hospitals now offer postpartum nursing instruction. A handful of enlightened companies offer employees facilities where they can breastfeed or pump milk. Breastfeeding has a certain cachet, even sexiness. Former congresswoman Susan Molinari made a show of nursing her infant while carrying out business on the telephone. In 1998, the New Yorker ran a Mother's Day cover of a tough, boot-clad, helmeted female construction worker suckling her infant while sitting on a girder high above the city.
This stylishness is decidedly to the good, for infants thrive on breast milk, and any interval of breastfeeding is better than none at all. Still, the tone of some of the La Leche-style literature sounds suspiciously similar to the tracts by Cadogan and Rousseau—judgmental and absolutist. Hiromo Goto, a Japanese Canadian novelist, wrote a short story that appeared in Ms. magazine in the fall of 1996, about a mother who dislikes breast-feeding. The character describes the weeks of endless pain and bloody nipples, the engorgement, the pressure from her husband and mother-in-law to keep at it regardless; it will get better, easier, more wonderful. I would do it myself if I could! her husband huffs. In the final phantasmagoric scene, she awakens at three in the morning, slices off her swollen breasts, attaches them to her husband's chest, rolls over, and happily goes back to sleep. Ms. readers responded to the story with outrage. They threatened to cancel their subscriptions. "It is hard enough to find social support for breastfeeding, without having it cast in such an extremely negative light in a 'feminist' magazine," one reader said. "While I certainly support the right of any woman to do with her body as she chooses, that decision should be made based upon complete and accurate information," another reader said. "Women do not have many opportunities to learn this womanly art [of suckling] in a culture where breastfeeding is discouraged." In other words, a woman can do as she chooses so long as she makes the right choice—that is, to breastfeed indefinitely, and at any cost.
Can we not forgo the polemics and exercise a little more maternal compassion here? In the real world of the two-career family, most women will breastfeed for the first few weeks or months of their baby's life, and then they will supplement or replace breast milk with formula. Like women throughout history, they will do the best they can under the constraints of work, duty, and desire. They will be generous and selfish, mammals and magicians, and they will flow and stop flowing. Whatever they do, they will feel guilty for not doing enough, and they will wish that they too could drink from the breast of Mary or Hera, thus becoming immortal mothers whose children will never die.
9. A GRAY AND YELLOW BASKET
THE BOUNTEOUS OVARY
THE OVARY IS no beauty. Most internal organs jiggle and glow and are rosy pink. The ovary is dull and gray. Even a healthy ovary looks sickly and drained of blood, as though it had given up hope. It is the size and shape of an unshelled almond, but a lumpy and irregular almond. It is scarred and pitted, for each cycle of ovulation leaves behind a white blemish where an egg follicle has been emptied of its contents. The older the woman, the more scarred her pair of ovaries will be. One might argue that the ovaries are no less visually appealing than the male equivalent, the testicles, but that is hardly high praise; recall that Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar likened testicles to poultry gizzards.
So the ovary isn't pretty. So it is gray and pitted and as lumpy as oatmeal. We would expect nothing less of an organ that works as hard as it does, tending to the disparate but joined needs of the known and the possible. The ovary is a seedpod, the domicile of our fixed portion of eggs, and you are supposed to use some of those eggs, inasmuch as life strives to perpetuate itself. The ovary is gray because it alone among residents of the pelvic cavity is not covered with the pinkish peritoneum, the springy membrane that encloses and protects other organs. The ovary cannot be enclosed because it must give up its belongings so often. It gives up eggs, yes, but it gives more than that. It gives up a kind of pudding, a yellowish tapioca of hormones that feed the reproductive cycle and the bodies we own. The ovary operates as a physiological and allegorical bridge between stasis and sexuality, between anatomy and behavior. Through its periodic hormonal emissions, the ovary makes itself known to us. We have looked at the egg. We turn now to its basket.
As Freud and many others have observed, very young children are more sexual creatures than grade-school children are. A girl of three or four gleefully pokes and prods her body and the bodies of adults. She wants to explore her vagina, her clitoris, her anus, any hole or pole she encounters, and much to the distress of her queasy and hypersensitive parents, she may even ask to touch her father's penis. She is polymorphously perverse, as Freud endearingly put it. If she is going to experience the so-called Electra complex, the female equivalent of the Oedipal complex, when a girl loves her father and wants to vanquish her mother, she may do it during this era of the lewd toddler.
The preschool girl's interest in sex reflects physiology, and the bizarre on-again, off-again dialogue between the gonads and the region of the brain that oversees them. Until girls and boys are three or four, a structure in the hypothalamus called the gonadotropin-releasing hormone pulse generator ticks and tocks and secretes tiny bursts of reproductive
hormones. It's like a lighthouse flashing slowly but unerringly in the fog, blip blip blip; every ninety minutes or so, out comes another glint of hormones. A girl's ovaries respond to the pulsatile message. They secrete small amounts of ovarian hormones in return. Nothing serious yet, not nearly enough to grow breasts or ovulate, but still the little girl is slightly waggish and slightly erotic. Her body, all bodies, fascinate her.
At the end of toddlerhood, through a mechanism that remains largely mysterious, the pulse generator in the brain shuts down. The clock stops. It ceases to secrete hormone signals. The ovaries too fall silent. They retreat into hibernation. For this reason, as well as through the tutelage of social expectations, the child is likely to turn prudish, to be easily embarrassed by bodily functions, and the thought of touching her father's penis, or any penis, or any part of any boy, may well make her gag. For the next seven years or so, she is an asexual, agonadal creature, blissful and free, the way you are on a journey, when you've left behind one set of cares and have yet to greet the new ones.
The first glimmerings of renewed care and perversity appear at the age of ten, not as a result of gonadal activity but at the behest of another set of organs: the adrenal glands, blood-rich structures that sit atop the kidneys like porkpie hats. Only within the past year or two have researchers discovered the contribution of the adrenals to the first stirrings of adolescence. The adrenals secrete adrenaline, the fire-under-thy-butt hormone, and they also release small doses of sex hormones. The adrenals mature at around ten years of age, and that is when a child may start fantasizing about sex and forming obsessive crushes on classmates or pop stars or teachers. The body of a ten-year-old girl may be prepubescent, but her brain is recharged, erotic again. (Do you remember? Oh, I remember. I remember fifth grade, when a boy sitting next to me in class dropped his pencil on the floor. He reached down to retrieve it, and when he sat up again he used my leg as a brace, and though I had no feelings for that boy—he was small and seemed so much younger than ten—still I felt a shock of pleasure run through my body, and I thought to myself, I am going to like sex.) After the adrenals have spoken, there is no turning back, and the pace and the hunger and the noise will only increase. The body will follow the lead of the mind, and it will become sexualized.
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