The MotherVerse Blog: mothering out loud

I am an avid proponent of looking to history to help us evaluate our past mistakes, celebrate our collective accomplishments, and glean insight into the trends of our current culture. That said, I am quite honored to be guest blogging at MotherVerse for the next couple of weeks to share historic photographs of American infant feeding dating from the Depression and War Era.

During this time, mothers came under tremendous pressure from both the dairy and medical industries to feed their infants cow’s milk. It wouldn’t be until the late 1950s that women started to question artificial feeding, but by this time nearly half of all American babies were fed milk from a can.

Over the course of my two week guest blogging stint, I will post photographs primarily showing mothers who blindly believed their breasts were second best, and who unquestioningly bottle-fed their children. Today, however, I want to share a picture of a mother who not only believed her breasts were superior to cow’s milk, she also did not mind showing the world.

This picture is quite remarkable, isn’t it? Here is a mother breastfeeding in public in 1943 and no one gives it a second thought. This picture shows a mother and other passengers waiting in a Greyhound bus terminal on a trip from Louisville, Kentucky to Memphis Tennessee. In other pictures in this collection, men are showed sitting two people down on her left and right.

Clearly times have changed and people have become terribly hypersensitive about breastfeeding in public. This is quite unfortunate and poses problems for mothers and their babies. Not surprisingly, we are now living in a time when women are more sexualized than ever which further blurs the line between women’s breasts as milk banks for babies and women’s breasts as sexual objects.

Judging from the picture below, we can see the struggle brewing between what people deemed appropriate and inappropriate for women’s breasts.

For Further Reading
I blog about infant feeding history and how it pertains to breastfeeding among black women today. Read Mothers, Breastfeeding and Laundry Duty.