Loose Threads: Fragments of Infant Feeding Histories

Joanna Wolfarth

Where to begin when invited to talk about histories of feeding babies? 

I sift through journal articles, notes on artworks, scraps of diary entries I jabbed into my phone during night feeds, pulling at threads to find a starting point. It’s a tight weave of different cultural ideas and contradictions and entangled emotions ranging from joy and frustration, sadness and empowerment, and it is thickly textured. The density of contradictions is bewildering; breastfeeding is promoted, encouraged, celebrated, yet also censured, discouraged and taboo;  bottle-feeding equally as confusing and exclusive expressing, donor-feeding, or shared nursing are often completely sidelined. Yet, the more I delve into the histories of infant feeding, the more I begin to understand how we got to where we are today. I see more about how society is influenced by ideals of motherhood and ideas about female bodies, which shift over the decades and centuries. How these contradictions are expressed in art, philosophy, and literature. When I was invited to talk about histories of infant feeding, I was overcome by how much I wanted to share. And by how impossible it is to convey so much in thirty minutes.

So, despite nothing but warmth and encouragement from the organisers, I was still nervous ahead of Feeding Futures in Manchester. 

Fortunately, before the talk, I met with a close friend and confessed my worries. They nodded sympathetically and then reminded me that a talk - or even a book - should never be a neatly wrapped parcel. Instead, they said: think of it as an invitation, a series of prompts for further conversation, a chance for others to share their experiences, ideas, and hopes for better futures. It’s okay to leave loose threads, they said. 

So, I start with myself, a method not always appreciated in more traditional academic circles but one which can be fruitful and necessary.

Like so many other researchers and artists, I came to the topic of breastfeeding already enmeshed within it. Research and writing was a way for me to make sense of my own experiences. Feeding my baby had left me changed, confused, sad, triumphant, elated, and sometimes angry. Feeding our babies - whether that is with chest, breast, bottle, Supplementary Nursing System, donor milk, formula, or with an allonurse - is one of our main jobs as a new parent. No wonder it’s emotive. It is also where body, identity, how we are perceived by the world, how we think we are being perceived by the world, and all our specific societal and cultural baggage come together, at what is perhaps one of our most vulnerable times in life.

My prenatal expectations were simple: before I knew that I wanted to be a mother, I knew I’d be a breastfeeding mother. And I sort of pictured it as ‘natural’, ‘best’, ‘easy’, and ‘free’.  The realities were startling; I hadn’t understood that while lactation is highly visible in some contexts, there is much that remains concealed.  I was unprepared for how much breastfeeding would mean to me deep in my core, or that it didn’t come easy for me and my baby and that what I perceived as my failure would lead me to the edges of somewhere very dark. 

As my baby latched, the images of breastfeeding I’d encountered as an art historian would flash through my head. The divine mother-figures - such as Isis or Yashoda -  who nurse gods and kings. The sculptures that appear to be of ‘ordinary’ people nursing babies, such as those from the Indus Valley or the Old Kingdom of Egypt, which are all over 4,000 years old. The countless cultural fragments which demonstrate that across time and place, lactation was held in high regard. And then, of course, there are the maternal images which laced my childhood: The Virgin Mary nursing Jesus. Doughy baby flesh and opaline breasts. 

But during these painful dawn feeds, I had forgotten that representations of breastfeeding can tell us how practices of breastfeeding and motherhood change over time and place [1]. How we can trace the ways that ideals of ‘the good mother’ are constructed and reconstructed in material culture.  I had forgotten how these ideas can still contribute to parents’ feelings of guilt, inadequacy, and even grief [2]. 

What was also invisible to me was that nothing happens in a vacuum; our choices -  when we are lucky enough to have them -  are shaped by circumstance, culture, society, demographics, physiology…But postpartum? It was all too easy to forget that. Even with a supportive community around us, we struggled. To be brief: when my baby was four weeks old we were sent to A&E by our health visitor because of weight loss. In hindsight, we were lucky that it was an issue with feeding rather than anything more serious. It was something easily resolved with formula top-ups, regime feeding, and an industrial breast pump.

But it all left me broken, lonely and bewildered, trying to make sense of my desire to breastfeed along with the contradictory values our society places on breastfeeding, especially when it intersected with other parts of my being: my work, my body, my relationships, my sexuality. I was without a language to process those emotions or a framework with which to make sense of them. So I went to the archives, trying to find something material to tether myself to. One of the first things I found were Victorian nipple shields made from ivory, wood, glass or wax, each quietly urging me to feel a little more kindly towards the slippery silicone nipple shields that I so loathed. Each reminding me that some women centuries ago were mitigating against painful latches. Suddenly, I felt a tug of connection, not only with my contemporary peers, but with those who came before me. I thought about our differences and our sameness. 

Then came another thread: the bottles. First it was Neolithic feeding vessels, small enough to sit comfortably in an infant’s sticky grip and some shaped in zoomorphic shapes that make them look like toys. Fragments of these vessels bear traces of ruminant animal milk, from cows, sheep, or goats [3]. While hygiene would make these far from ideal for smaller babies - who would have undoubtedly been breastfeed - these vessels were more likely used during weaning. They may have allowed parents to wean infants earlier, lessening the gap between births. As humans began to abandon the nomadic life and settle in farming communities higher birth rates were more favourable.

These were another reminder to myself that what happens at a social, economic level can impact us all. It is not enough to simply tell parents to breastfeed without giving them adequate support.  

I can’t stop looking at an image of a nursing Mary sitting for her portrait, which is being sketched by Saint Luke. Here she is looking proud, capable and strong. But to me this image is a metaphor for how new parents also feel under scrutiny, watched, judged. Our potential power squashed under patriarchal dominance. It is a scene which encapsulates the discomforts we can feel when feeding our babies, which is connected to broader issues of reproductive rights, freedom to move freely in public without fear of violence, the scrutiny that female and nonbinary bodies are subject too, always told we are lacking or flawed. It reminds me that under patriarchy, we will always struggle for full liberation in feeding our babies however we want to feed our babies.

Our galaxy is named the Milky Way. According to Greek myth, the stars formed from droplets of divine milk from Hera’s lactating breasts. When my baby was small I visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery and stood in front of a painting by Peter Paul Reubens of the Roman goddess Venus squirting milk from her breast into the mouth of a young Cupid, while Mars wearily looks on. I bought a postcard of it, shortly after I’d breastfed in the gallery café. I never experienced any obvious overt hassle when I breastfed in public, but on this occasion I’m sure I saw a wrinkle of discomfort pass over the faces of the table sat beside us, as I subtly pulled my blouse to one side and my baby, an expert by that point, latched without fuss.

Had they seen this painting I wondered? Milk on a canvas is acceptable, metaphorical milk is okay. Divine lactating bodies can create galaxies, but actual bodies - female and nonbinary bodies - are just a bit too messy and unruly. Possibly also a potential contagion. The Ancient Greeks bear some responsibility for the long histories of bodily taboo in the West.  

Slowly, these threads of initial research allowed me to start stitching myself into something bigger. It made me think we need to stitch ourselves together into communities. I keep thinking we are so often missing out on something so much bigger and more empowering - regardless of how we feed our babies - finding ourselves caught between binary and contradictory messages about breasts and about milk and mothering. 

We deserve the space to talk through these fragments of history, to share experiences when we feel comfortable doing so, to accept others and ourselves when we do differently. To sit with contradictions. We have been deterred from doing so for so long. 

Feeding Futures provided one such space. In Manchester, in conversations with parents, lactation specialists, activists, artists, many more threads were added to my own personal tapestry. Together, we might change the fabric on which we feed. 

Watch Joanna’s talk here