Abstract
Breasts and breastfeeding have long since been the locus of political struggles concerning femininity, motherhood and childrearing; yet although breastfeeding is a contemporary personal and political issue, the battle between breastfeeding and other forms of infant feeding is not new. For example, between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, wet-nursing was common in Britain, France, the Southern States of America and the British Colonies (Carter 1995) and as Evans (1995:vii) writes: ‘Once upon a time all babies in Western societies were breastfed [but] they were not, necessarily fed by their mothers’. Although wet-nursing is no longer commonplace within these societies, breastmilk now competes with the mass manufacture, marketing and distribution of formula milk.
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© 2003 Sarah Earle
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Earle, S. (2003). Is Breast Best? Breastfeeding, Motherhood and Identity. In: Earle, S., Letherby, G. (eds) Gender, Identity & Reproduction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522930_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522930_9
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