Modern mothers, modern babies: breastfeeding and mother’s milk in interwar Britain

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1938, an obituary of Frederic Truby King, the New Zealand doctor who had founded the Mothercraft Training Society in London in 1918 announced that he had ‘hypnotise[d] thousands of mothers into the belief that breast feeding is the important factor in infant care … ’ (Mother and Child (March 1938): 454). Truby King was an influential figure in the promotion of ‘scientific breastfeeding’, and this article investigates the position of breastfeeding in infant welfare and infant care advice directed at middle-class mothers in the interwar period. Positioned as the ‘natural’ way of feeding infants, breastfeeding was concurrently represented as the ‘modern’ and ‘scientific’ way of safeguarding babies’ healthy development. This article examines the development of the science of breastfeeding, which centred on the practice of breastfeeding and breast milk as a substance, and explores middle-class women’s experiences of breastfeeding in interwar Britain.