Learning How to Mother: An Ethnographic Investigation of an Urban Breastfeeding Group

Abstract

This investigation describes an urban La Leche League breastfeeding support group in western New York. In viewing the organization's origins as a per-petuative-rational nativistic movement (Linton 1943), the group demonstrates how some mothers are adapting to the effects of rapid social change, particularly on the mother-infant bond. Members of the group are transmitting a style of natural mothering based on complete breastfeeding by relying on intragenerational modeling (Mead 1978). The study follows a method of “well-grounded ethnography” (Gearing 1981); the result is a (behavioral) emic structural-functional analysis.