breast-feeding: a political issue for women
Earlier this year, ISIS published a booklet called Bottle Babies, a guide to the baby foods issue (Geneva, March 1976). It was compiled as a result of our having seen the film of the same name and especially of our contact with the Third World Action Group (Arbeits-Gruppe Dritte Welt) in Bern who were then in the midst of their libel suit with Nestle.
The guide got good responses in many fields, but very little from the various women's groups we sent it to, and we finally got somw specific negative feedback from one feminist involved in the current court case in the states. She said that it was either written by men or male-oriented. She's right. But once again just were abortion in the late sixties- the whole debate about something which primarily concerns WOMEN is being conducted by MEN.
Why? We think the politics of the situation have not been sufficiently (if ever) dealt with, the following article gives an outline of the complexities envolved in a situation where women are, yet again, he (unconscious?) victim of manipulation by a capital/ male-oriented consumer world.
The Case
It is by now well established and undisputed that bottle feeding in the wrong conditions is highly dangerous. In areas where the adequate hygienic conditions do not exist, and where people do not have the money to buy sufficient quantities of expensive imported milk products, bottle feeding is lethal: it leads to malnutrition, disease and death of many hundreds of babies.
The factors which have contributed to the increase in bottle feeding, especially in the so-called "developing" countries are also well documented*.
Amongst these are increasing urbanization and the need for women to go to work; Ihe need for an alternative to breast milk when breast feeding is not possible ( actually , biologically, less than 5% of women cannot breast feed), and most importantly the need for baby food manufacturers to continually find new markets for their products.
The activities of the big baby food manufacturers (especially Nestle and Bristol-Myers) have come under much fire recently. Their insidious Use of advertising, especially by radio which reaches illiterate people most effectively, and their subtle play on the basic psychological mechanism which makes breast feeding possible - the mother's self-confidence and emotional response - have been the target of an international attack. They are introducing a technology (bottle and teat) which may not be appropriate or even necessary.
Women - the contradictions
What is not adequately examined, however, is the way in which women at all levels of society (whether in "developing" or industrialized countries) have been sucked into giving up a basic human right. There are many factors which play a role here, especially since women in different parts of the world and most importantly, in different social classes have different pressures to contend with. Yet the case of bottle feeding/ breast feeding is a magnificent case study for showing some of the fundamental contradictions of western industrialized society which centre on women.
1. Women in rural and urban areas of "developing" countries are beginning to believe that the bottle gives status. It is one of the mechanisms of class that those who are worse off strive to gain status by copying those who appear to be "better" off. When you are sitting in a slum in Nairobi with a thin, sickly baby, and you see an advertisement showing a big healthy baby being fed with a bottle, the desire to not only climb out of poverty but also to have a big healthy baby obviously leads to your buying a feeding bottle. The bottle has become a symbol of being better off. This is not only disastrous medically and economically, but tragically ironic in that some women in Europe and North America (who may be trend setters here) are beginning to go back to breast feeding.
2. Working class women, whether in " developing" countries or industrialized ones, do not have a choice. Since they have to go out to work to help support the family, they cannot s it down and ask "am I going to breast or bottle feed?" Usually what happens is that the baby is left at home with an older child (e.g. in Africa) or looked after by a neighbour, and this person bottle feeds it while the mother works.
The case of working class women in urban Latin America or Africa may be different from the woman in, say, Britain. The hygiene dangers mentioned earlier make the "developing" country situation more serious. Yet in both situations what is happening is that women are becoming dependent on an industrial ( profit- oriented ) creation. They are the suckers because they are dependent upon (and therefore also he help to perpetuate) the consumer-industrial society v/here they pay ever increasing sums of money to procure goods which are not only unnecessary but actually harmful. This is important because women are a major force in keeping the production cycle operating . If women stopped buying much of what i s being produced in ever more refined and beautifully packaged quantities, transnational corporations would have a big problem. Breast milk is a perfectly good, not to say ideal product for feeding very young babies.* Yet the main reason working class women cannot breast feed is that they have to earn their living.
3. Bottle feeding is seen as an instrument of liberation for women in other classes ( especially the middle classes) because (a) the task of feeding can be shared with the husband or partner or friend, and (b) it does not tie her 24 hours a day to the baby, so she can devote herself to other things, job , career etc. This may sound important, especially for women in industrialized countries, where anything which gives us more independence is a factor contributing to our liberation.
But this is based on the notion, it reproduction is somehow a dis tasteful task that women have the misfortune to be landed with, and the more we can farm it out to others, the better. Witness, for instance, the horror with which breast feeding in public, is regarded ( in the west at least ); or the age-old excuse for not employing women - they're always getting pregnant; or the way in which pregnancy and childbirth are traditionally and still treated as a disease and a surgical case. Women have had to apologize for having the ability to reproduce and for following through with that.
What has not ever really been examined is that this is precisely what our consumer- industrial society needs in order for it to keep functioning. As long as women are demanding more gadgets to help them rid themselves of the reproduction process, then transnational companies will have a hey-day inventing endless sophisticated and costly devices to help them do that.
One central point links these situations: as long as reproduction is seen as belonging to the private sector, i.e. that it's each individual woman's problem, then the exploitation of rural women, women in factories and elsewhere will continue. Not until reproduction is seen as a collective social responsibility will it be possible to:
(a) give value to it, there for e making it possible for women to have babies and do other things at the same time, because such things as daycare centres, breast feeding cooperatives and health clinics will be an inevitable social service;
(b) consider breast feeding a totally normal functions and make social provisions accordingly - creches. in the work-place with working hours allowing for feeding breaks;
( c ) allow women to choose how they want to feed their babies on the basis of full information and possibilities
On the surface, the use of the feeding bottle and the powdered milk which goes with it can be seen as anything from a lethal drug to a tool of liberation. In reality it hides behind it a whole gamut of socio-economic and political factors affecting the situation of women.
Breast feeding is not just a question of biology or convenience: it is a highly political question which women who are fighting for liberation everywhere have to take up.