by Jill Lepore
“To Us the whole Theatre of the World is now open,” Harvey had written, during the age of discovery. For Stanley Kubrick, it wasn’t inner space but outer space that his Discovery explored, a whole new world. But, really, it was the same place, a world without women. In the space age, the secrets of generation were at last discovered, in a galaxy terribly far away.
[CHAPTER 2]
Baby Food
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, there were some new rules governing what used to be called “mother’s milk,” or “breast milk,” including one about what to call it when it’s no longer in a mother’s breast. An explanation, nomenclatural: “expressed human milk” is milk that has been pressed, squeezed, or sucked out of a woman’s breast by hand or by machine, but not by a baby, and stored in a bottle or a jar or, best for freezing, in a plastic bag secured with a twist tie. Matters, regulatory: Could a woman carry containers of her own milk on an airplane? Before 2008, not more than three ounces, because the U.S. government’s Transportation Security Administration classed human milk with shampoo, toothpaste, and Gatorade until a Minneapolis woman heading home after a business trip was reduced to tears when a security guard at LaGuardia Airport poured a two-day supply of her milk into a garbage bin, leading protesting mothers to stage airport “nurse-ins”; Dr. Ruth Lawrence of the breast-feeding committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics to tell the press, “She needs every drop of that precious golden fluid for her baby”; and the TSA to reclassify human milk as “liquid medication.”1 Could a woman sell her milk on eBay? It had been done and, so far, with no more consequence than the opprobrium of the blogosphere, at least until the Federal Drug Administration decided to tackle that one. Could women share their milk over Facebook? This, too, had been done (it was called “Eats on Feets,” after Meals on Wheels), and, although the Canadian Paediatric Society deemed it inadvisable, what the Centers for Disease Control had to say about it remained to be seen.2 That agency did, however, provide a fact sheet about “What to Do If an Infant or Child Is Mistakenly Fed Another Woman’s Expressed Breast Milk,” which could happen at day care centers where fridges were full of bags of milk, labeled in smudgeable ink. (The CDC solemnly advised that a switch “should be treated just as if an accidental exposure to other bodily fluids occurred.”) During a nine-hour exam, could a woman take a break to express the milk uncomfortably filling her breasts? No, because the Americans with Disabilities Act did not consider lactation a disability.3 Could a human milk bank pay a woman for her milk? (Milk banks supply pasteurized human milk to hospitals.) No, because making of human milk a cash cow violated the ethical standards of the Human Milk Banking Association of North America.4 If a nursing woman drank to excess—alcohol flows from the bloodstream into the mammary glands—could she be charged with child abuse? Hadn’t happened yet, but there had been talk. Meanwhile, women who were worried could test a drop with a product called Milkscreen; if the alcohol level was too high, the recommendation was: pump and dump.5
An observation, historical: all this seemed so new that people were making up the rules as they went along.6 Before the 1990s, electric breast pumps, sophisticated pieces of medical equipment, were generally available only in hospitals, where they were used to express milk from women with inverted nipples or from mothers of premature or low-birth-weight infants too weak and tiny to suck and who needed to be fed milk through a tube snaked down the esophagus. But by the first decade of the twenty-first century, breasts pumps were so ubiquitous a personal accessory, they were more like cell phones than catheters.7 During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Republican vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, told People magazine that she had often found herself having to “put down the BlackBerries and pick up the breast pump.”8 In 2010, staffers and newly elected politicians arriving in Washington and looking for a place to pump their milk availed themselves of six “lactation suites” known as “boob cubes.” The first was opened after then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pushed for a pumping station in a room in the basement of the Capitol Building. It was equipped, the Associated Press reported, with “multiline phones, a TV often tuned to C-SPAN, and power outlets for laptops. Women who made calls from a phone in that room found that the caller ID read, ‘infant lactation.’ ”9 In 2011, First Lady Michelle Obama urged the IRS to give tax breaks for breast pumps.10
Ectogenesis was a still a science fiction fantasy, the stuff of Haldane and Huxley, but ectolactation was everywhere. There were as yet no Hatcheries, but there were boob cubes in the very halls of government. Strangest of all: not many people seemed to find this freakishly dystopian, merely troubling, or even objectionable.
A treatise, mercantile: Medela, a Swiss company founded in 1961, introduced its first non-hospital, electric-powered, vacuum-operated breast pump in the United States in 1991; five years later it launched the swank Pump In Style. Its sales soon quadrupled. The traffic in pumps was brisk, although accurate sales figures were hard to come by, not least because many people bought the top-of-the-line models secondhand. (Manufacturers pointed out that if you wouldn’t buy a used toothbrush, you shouldn’t buy a used breast pump; but a toothbrush didn’t cost three hundred dollars, and most women figured that, so long as you sterilized the hell out of the thing, it wasn’t unsanitary.) Then there was the swag. “Baby-friendly” maternity wards that had once sent new mothers home with free samples of infant formula began giving out manual pumps: plastic, one-breast-at-a-time gizmos that work like a cross between a straw and a bicycle pump. Walmart sold an Evenflo pump at a bargain. Avent made one “featuring new iQ Technology”; the pitch was that the pump’s memory chip made it smart, but the name also played on well past dubious claims that human milk raises IQ scores.11 Still swisher, state-of-the-art pumps whose motors, tubes, and freeze packs were wedged into bags disguised to look like black leather Fendi briefcases and Gucci backpacks were a must-have at baby showers; the Medela Pump In Style Metro Model—“the CEO of breast pumps”—was a particular rage; you could pick one up at any department store.
Medela also sold Pump & Save storage bags and breast shields (a shield is the hard plastic part of the contraption that fits over the breast; it looks like a horn of plenty). Plug Medela’s no-hands model into your car’s cigarette lighter: pump ’n’ drive. Better yet, pump, drive, ’n’ text: strenuous motherhood was de rigueur. Duck into the ladies’ room at a conference of doctors, lawyers, or professors and, chances were, you’d find a flock of women with matching “briefcases” waiting—none too patiently and, trust me, more than a little sheepishly—for a turn with the electric outlet. Pumps came with plastic sleeves, like the sleeves in a man’s wallet, into which a mother was supposed to slip a photograph of her baby because, Pavlovian, looking at the picture aids “letdown,” the release of milk normally triggered by the presence of the baby, his touch, his cry. Staring at that picture when your baby was miles away: it could make you cry, too. Pumping is no fun—whether it is more boring or more lonesome I find hard to say—but it wasn’t just common; it had become strangely trendy, too, so trendy that even women who were home with their babies all day long expressed their milk and fed it to their babies in a bottle. American women pumped milk like no other women in the world. Behind closed doors, the nation began to look like a giant human dairy farm.
Meanwhile, the evolving rules governing human milk, including a proposed Breastfeeding Promotion Act, made for nothing so much as a muddle. They indulged in a nomenclatural sleight of hand, eliding “breast-feeding” and “feeding human milk.” They were purblind, unwilling to eye whether it’s his mother or her milk that matters more to a baby. They suffered from a category error. Human milk is food. Is it an elixir, a commodity, a right? This question about life and death was, at heart, taxonomical. And, like most questions about life and death, it had been asked before.
Taxonomy follows anatomy: William Harvey sought the origins of life; the Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus sorted the kinds of life. Linnaeus’s parents h
ad wanted him to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a priest, but, from boyhood, he loved plants and their quirky names. In 1735, he was twenty-eight and just finishing his study of medicine when he published the first edition of his Systema Naturae, in which he proposed a system for classifying and naming all living things. At first, he placed humans in a category called Quadrupedia: four-footed beasts. This was heresy; in Genesis, men are not animals. (Linnaeus, a devout Lutheran, considered his work to be honoring God’s creation, in that he was deducing, by observation, the divine order of nature.) But even those of Linneaus’s critics who conceded the animality of man averred, none too gently, that people have two feet, not four. Ah, but hands are just feet that can grip, Linnaeus ventured. This proved unpersuasive. By 1758, in a process brilliantly reconstructed by the historian of science Londa Schiebinger, Linnaeus had abandoned Quadrupedia in favor of a word he’d made up: Mammalia, for animals with milk-producing nipples.
He derived this word from the Latin root mamma, meaning breast, teat, or udder. Mamma is closely related to the onomatopoeic “mama,” mother, thought to come from the sound a baby makes while suckling. Mammals are mammals and humans are mammals because they make milk. As categories go, mammal is an improvement over quadruped, especially if you’re thinking about what people have in common with whales. But, for a while at least, it was deemed scandalously erotic. (Linnaeus’s classification of plants based on their reproductive organs, stamens and pistils, fell prey to a similar attack. “Loathsome harlotry,” one botanist called it.) More importantly, the name falls something short of capacious: only female mammals lactate; males, in a strict sense, are not mammals. Plenty of other features distinguish mammals from Linnaeus’s five other animal classes: birds, amphibians, fish, insects, and worms. (Tetracoilia, animals with a four-chambered heart, proposed by a contemporary of Linnaeus’s, the Scottish surgeon John Hunter, was, quite possibly, a better idea.) And if it’s the milk that matters most, why not gather the cetaceous with the human, male and female, under Lactentia: animals whose young suckle?
Linnaeus had his reasons; mostly, they were political. Naysayers might doubt that humans are essentially four-footed (whether on scriptural or arithmetic grounds), but no man born of woman, he figured, would dare deny that he was nourished by mother’s milk. Then, too, while Linnaeus was revising his Systema Naturae from the fourteen-page pamphlet he published in 1735 to the two-thousand-page opus of 1758—and abandoning Quadrupedia in favor of Mammalia—his wife was, not irrelevantly, lactating. Between 1741 and 1757, she bore and nursed seven children (two of whom died young). The father of taxonomy was a father of five. He also taught medicine and treated patients—he specialized in syphilis—and lectured and campaigned against the widespread custom of wet-nursing.
The practice is ancient; contracts for wet nurses have been found on scrolls in Babylonia. (Poor women with milky breasts, hired to nurse their betters’ infants, were known as wet nurses, as opposed to governesses, or “dry nurses.”) Some women can’t breast-feed, and wet nurses also save the lives of infants whose mothers die in childbirth. But in Linnaeus’s time, extraordinary numbers of European mothers—as many as 90 percent of Frenchwomen—simply refused to breast-feed their babies and instead hired servants to do the work. In 1752, Linnaeus wrote a treatise entitled “Step Nurse,” declaring wet-nursing a crime against nature. Even the fiercest beasts nurse their young, with utmost tenderness: surely women who resisted their mammalian destiny were to be ranked as lowlier, even, than the lowliest brute.12
Enlightenment doctors, philosophers, and legislators agreed: women should nurse their children. Rousseau prophesied in Émile, “When mothers design to nurse their own children, then morals will reform themselves.” (Voltaire had a quibble or two about Rousseau’s own morals: the author of Émile abandoned his five illegitimate children at birth, at a foundling hospital.) “There is no nurse like a mother,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1785, after learning about an infant mortality rate of 85 percent at a foundling hospital in Paris that relied on wet nurses (the hospital where Rousseau’s children all but certainly died); the discovery may explain why Franklin, in his autobiography, went to the trouble of remarking about his own mother, “She suckled all her ten children.”13 But Franklin’s mother was hardly unusual; wet nurses were not nearly as common in colonial America as they were in eighteenth-century Europe. “Suckle your Infant your Self if you can,” Cotton Mather commanded from his pulpit. Puritans found milk divine, even the good book gave suck. Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, Drawn Out of the Breasts of Both Testaments was the title of a popular catechism.14 By the end of the eighteenth century, breast-feeding had come to seem an act of citizenship. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, scoffed that a woman who “neither suckles nor educates her children, scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to that of a citizen.” (More commonly, political theorists argued that what made women different from men meant that they could not be citizens.) The next year, the French National Convention ruled that women who employed wet nurses could not apply for state aid; not long after, Prussia made refusing to breast-feed a crime.15
There was also a soppy side to the age of reason. In 1793, Erasmus Darwin offered, in Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life, a good summary of the eighteenth century’s passionate attitude toward the milky breast:
When the babe, soon after it is born into this cold world, is applied to its mother’s bosom; its sense of perceiving warmth is first agreeably affected; next its sense of smell is delighted with the odour of her milk; then its taste is gratified by the flavour of it; afterwards the appetites of hunger and thirst afford pleasure by the possession of their objects, and by the subsequent digestion of the aliment; and, lastly, the sense of touch is delighted by the softness and smoothness of the milky fountain, the source of such variety and happiness.16
If, on the one hand, there is nothing more animal about a woman than the milk in her breasts, there is, on the other hand, nothing more divine. Beliefs about mother’s milk, like the secrets of generation, have often bordered on the mystical; what has changed over time is what kind of mystery people are talking about. A half century after Erasmus Darwin, across the Atlantic, this kind of thing turned into an even milkier cult of motherhood, abundantly illustrated in a craze for mammary photography; archives and museums all over the United States house daguerreotypes from the 1850s of babies suckling beneath the unbuttoned bodices of prim, sober American matrons, looking half Emily Dickinson, half da Vinci’s Madonna and Child.17
Then, bizarrely and almost overnight, American women seemed to be running out of milk. “Every physician is becoming convinced that the number of mothers able to nurse their own children is decreasing,” one doctor wrote. Another reported that there was “something wrong with the mammary glands of the mothers in this country.”18 That this happened in the latter half of the nineteenth century—just when the first artificial infant foods were becoming commercially available—is no mere coincidence. Cows were proclaimed the new “wet nurse to the human race.” About the time Milton Bradley was hanging up a shingle in Springfield, setting himself up as a patent solicitor, the Texas beef industryman Gail Borden, who aspired to be “the World’s Cook,” applied for a patent for condensed cow’s milk. Not long after, you could buy milk in a can.19
Most of what marketers said were the nutritive and curative properties of cow’s milk—it soothes a burn; it helps you get to sleep; it makes your bones grow—were claims appropriated from conventional wisdom about human milk. Tragically, very many babies fed on modified cow’s milk died, which is one reason why, in the United States, nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century physicians, far from pressing formula on their patients, urged them to breast-feed. Many women, however, simply refused, not unlike all those eighteenth-century Frenchwomen who hired wet nurses. Or, actually, what American women did was different: they insisted that they lacked for milk, mammals no more.
Evolutio
n is the organic version of the mechanical idea of progress. It wasn’t only machines that could get better and better, by invention; animals could improve, too, by evolution. In 1871, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, in which he speculated that the anomalous occurrence in humans of extra nipples represented a reversion to an earlier stage of evolution.20 If our ancestors once suckled litters of four or six, and if—as was supposed—men had nipples because male mammals once produced milk, maybe women, too, were evolving out of the whole business. By 1904, one Chicago pediatrician could argue that “the nursing function is destined gradually to disappear.” Gilded Age white American women considered themselves so refined, so civilized, so delicate. How could they suckle like bovines? (By the turn of the century, the cow’s udder, or even her head, had replaced the female human breast as the icon of milk.) Behind this question lay another, darker and crueler: How could a white woman nurse a baby the way a black woman does? It was so … animal.
Linnaeus had claimed that African women make a prodigious amount of milk: “Feminis sine pudoris; mammae lactantes prolixae” (Women without shame; breasts lactate profusely).21 In the United States, generations of black women, slave and free alike, not only nursed their own infants but also served as wet nurses to white babies. In the nineteenth century, racial theorists, who measured heads to classify the “races,” measured milk for the same purpose: they ran microscopic tests of human milk and concluded that the whiter the mother, the less nutritious her milk. Hardly surprising, then, that well-heeled white women told their doctors they had insufficient milk. By the 1910s, a study of one thousand Boston women had reported that 90 percent of the poor mothers breast-fed but only 17 percent of the wealthy mothers. Doctors, pointing out that evolution doesn’t happen so fast, tried to convince these Brahmins to breast-feed, but by then, it was too late.