Breastfeeding and feminism

Abstract

Breastfeeding empowers women and contributes to gender equality; therefore, it is an important feminist, human rights, and women's issue. Although seldom addressed as a feminist issue, breastfeeding is paradigmatically one because it requires rethinking basic issues such as the sexual division of labor, the fit between women's productive and reproductive lives, and the role of physiological processes in defining gender ideology. The conceptual problems which emerge in the fit between breastfeeding promotion and feminist theory include the place of motherhood; technology versus liberation; fear of biological determinism; breasts and sexuality; locating guilt; personal choice; romanticizing breastfeeding; and conceptualizing women's work. Feminist theorists who take up breastfeeding as an issue and medical researchers who address questions raised by feminist theory have the occasion to produce a non-dualistic feminist problematic that would draw together a wide range of theories and practices that go beyond breastfeeding and mothering. The failure to develop this analysis could have serious consequences.