20th century
A01=Jessica Martucci
american culture
Author_Jessica Martucci
baby
breast milk
breastfeeding
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
child
children
consumption
environment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
ethical
feeding
feminism
gender
health policy
ideology
infant development
kid
management
maternal instincts
medical ethics
medicine
morality
morals
mother
motherhood
natural
naturalism movement
nature
nutrition
parent
parenthood
political
sexuality
united states of america
usa
Product details
- ISBN 9780226288031
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 17 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 20 Nov 2015
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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After decades of decline during the twentieth century, breastfeeding rates began to rise again in the 1970s, a rebound that has continued to the present. While it would be easy to see this reemergence as simply part of the naturalism movement of the '70s, Jessica Martucci reveals here that the true story is more complicated. Despite the widespread acceptance and even advocacy of formula feeding by many in the medical establishment throughout the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, a small but vocal minority of mothers, drawing upon emerging scientific and cultural ideas about maternal instinct, infant development, and connections between the body and mind, pushed back against both hospital policies and cultural norms by breastfeeding their children. As Martucci shows, their choices helped ideologically root a "back to the breast" movement within segments of the middle-class, college-educated population as early as the 1950s. That movement-in which the personal and political were inextricably linked-effectively challenged midcentury norms of sexuality, gender, and consumption, and articulated early environmental concerns about chemical and nuclear contamination of foods, bodies, and breast milk.
In its groundbreaking chronicle of the breastfeeding movement, Back to the Breast provides a welcome and vital account of what it has meant, and what it means today, to breastfeed in modern America.
Jessica Martucci is a fellow in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia.
