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This article explores the history of breastfeeding in postwar America and places it within a larger framework of the intersections of science, culture, and gender. Through an exploration of the history of breast-feeding at its nadir, it argues that the movement back to the breast that became visible in the 1970s was rooted in the emergence of the ideology of natural motherhood in the decades surrounding World War II. Natural motherhood relied upon a scientific understanding of nature and motherhood in which interconnected physiological and emotional processes unfolded instinctually in the bodies of mothers and infants along a largely predetermined pattern. Through an analysis of scientific and prescriptive literature on family, child rearing, and sexuality, and the letters of women themselves, this article seeks to understand the persistent choices of mothers to breastfeed in this period and asks what meaning the practice held.
In 1956, Martha Pugacz, mother of four and advocate for natural childbirth and breastfeeding in Cleveland, Ohio, wrote to Hazel Corbin of the Maternity Center Association to discuss an issue that had long been on her mind. In the 1940s and 1950s, Martha belonged to a shrinking cohort of American mothers who breastfed. As a member of the Association for Parent Education group in her area she knew a wide range of information and resources about natural childbirth and breastfeeding. Unable to avoid the anesthetic options offered to her for the births of her first two children, whom she delivered under "black-out," she was happy to be able to breastfeed all four of her children. She fondly reminisced in her letter that she had "weaned our last baby just one week before her first birthday and enjoyed nursing her even more than our first three." Despite her own successes, she noted the growing need for a network of breastfeeding advocates. "For breast feeding there is no product, thus no sponsor," she observed, and yet she knew many mothers who wanted to breastfeed. "I have help [sic] 15 mothers myself (mothers who had from 2 to 4 bottle babies and were told they couldn't nurse) but feel that a larger group organized for this purpose would be more effective to a larger group of women."1 At the time, Martha remained unaware that...