There’s an interesting discussion going on right now on Slate.com between two major players on the breastfeeding landscape. Hannah Rosin (whom, in the interest of self-disclosure, I personally worship as a writer and social critic) and Katie Allison Granju, one of the world’s leading lactivist voices, are in a heated debate over Elisabeth Badinter’s new book, “The Conflict.” And it is one hell of a conversation, from two very smart, and very different women.
For those of you not familiar with Badinter, she’s a French feminist who claims that “modern motherhood undermines the status of women”. She argues that we have become slaves to our infants; that we are all obsessively striving to be perfect mothers, which has come to mean “natural” mothers. She does not take too kindly to attachment parenting practices like co-sleeping, med-free birth, and mandatory, exclusive breastfeeding.
I haven’t read the book yet (because that would require several hours of free time, which if I were lucky enough to have, I would rather spend watching Teen Mom and yelling at the television) but I have read practically every interview Badinter has given since her book was announced. I understand her point of view. I do not agree with all of what she says; I think she’s rather extreme and judgmental in ways which only serve to put down other people’s choices, when the goal should be ending society’s free-for-all on mother blaming. But I do agree with what she says about breastfeeding in this recent interview with the Washington Post:
“I am not criticizing breast-feeding, only the duty to breast-feed. Even if there were more substantial “public and institutional support” to help women breast-feed, that wouldn’t change the fact that not all women necessarily want to breast-feed. And those women must be free to bottle-feed without being bullied with the idea that they are bad mothers.”
Anyway, love her or hate her, she’s certainly causing a stir. Unfortunately, any truths that she is revealing are being obscured by her too-heavy hand; she’s putting people on the defensive, and as we all know on this blog, that tends to lead to a big fat FAIL. I’m not sure Badinter cares, and I envy this about her; she isn’t trying to make friends, but rather present her theories and, let’s face it, sell books. More power to her – we need more opposing voices to counter the current trends in parenting culture. I don’t need to agree with her to appreciate that she is taking on the myths of motherhood which torment so many of us.
Some people are not so appreciative of Badinter, though. Granju has gone back and forth with Hannah Rosin (who thought the book had valid points, many of which she has made in her own writing) in a series of published exchanges, the last of which included this paragraph:
As for Badinter’s views on breast-feeding, I think that it’s important to note that her position on this issue is ethically suspect from the get-go. Elisabeth Badinter isn’t simply an incendiary and stylish French feminist theorist. She also personally holds controlling interest in Publicis, one of the world’s most powerful and profitable PR and advertising firms. As it happens, Publicis is the agency of record for Nestlé , the huge multinational corporation that makes and sells a wide variety of infant formula products all over the globe, and which is arguably best known for its lengthy and ongoing history of flagrant violations of the World Health Organization’s International Code of Marketing of Breastmilk Substitutes. Considering that Badinter styles herself as an honest-to-God academic—a serious one with serious credentials—it’s troubling, to say the least, that she doesn’t seem to feel the need to proactively disclose the obvious conflicts posed by her millions in income from Nestlé ’s PR firm.
…if American women are, in fact, being subjected to crushing, guilt-inducing nursing shame, it doesn’t appear to be working too well. While breast-feeding rates in the U.S. have edged up overall in recent years, and are indeed crazy high in certain highly specific subpopulations of American women (Park Slope-dwellers, residents of Portlandia), the overall breast-feeding numbers in the United States tell a quite different story…Given that, by the numbers, not very many American women at all seem to be “enslaved” by breast-feeding in the way Badinter claims, how is it that breast-feeding is “undermining our status”?
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