Sir, – When I was breastfeeding my own four babies (born between 1989 and 1997), I was so mystified by the “aren’t you great . . . are you mad?” spectrum of responses from women who had had babies between about 1945 and 1970, that I decided to investigate.
Jacky Jones ("Breast is best but not for Irish babies", Second Opinion, Health + Family, August 25th) might be interested to read my published research on this subject (2000, 2004), which draws on both documentary and oral evidence to conclude that no amount of medical, official or older-generational advice – and there was plenty of it – could induce that generation of women to breastfeed.
Women who gave birth in hospital were actually more likely to breastfeed than women who gave birth at home. (Two women I spoke to, a farmer’s wife from the midlands and a Cork city woman, were highly indignant at having been coerced into breastfeeding in hospital in the 1950s). Entrenched patriarchs (some old country men, for example) were quite hostile to bottle-feeding, and women who opted for it felt they were making a claim for themselves and their own bodily integrity in a time and place that denied them any choice about the number of children they had. Furthermore, bottle-feeding meant that a husband could “get up in the night” too, and this fitted in with the new companionate marriages many women in that period demanded.
I would always encourage and support breastfeeding, but if we don’t understand why it died out, then we can’t revive it.
Women make complex and difficult choices about their bodies all the time, and breastfeeding advocates must accept that not all women can, or want to, breastfeed. – Yours, etc,
CAITRIONA CLEAR,
Department of History,
NUI, Galway.