(no subject)
This morning I poured myself a cup of coffee and read this article, in which Jill Lepore examines the emergence-- and drawbacks-- of the breast pump, and the increasingly common practice of bottling mother's milk and saving it for later. Admittedly, it's a topic I have always found to be a little squeamish, bringing to mind the unflattering bovine equivalent. But I found the article to be quite disagreeable and, by the end of it, considered sending a litigious email to the New Yorker in response. I may still do that, if I can properly organize my thoughts here first.
Up until a couple of months ago, I had never considered breast-feeding as something that I might personally do should I ever have a child. I was fed exclusively formula, and consider myself to be a perfectly viable human being. The topic came up with a close friend, who reacted to my declaration with horror and insisted that it was wholly selfish not to breast-feed, and that denying my children my own milk would be detrimental to their livelihood and intelligence. After some time, I irascibly snapped that the conversation would necessarily have to end. That my friend had lambasted my personal choice angered me, but the greater cause of my annoyance was the fact that my friend was a man. Men may freely express their opinions on the necessity or lackthereof of breast-feeding-- the article, in fact, quotes men such as Carl Linnaeus, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin-- but they don't share its burden. Pardon my being a feminist bitch, but men can never attain real expertise on motherhood. If I become a mother, no man is going to make me feel like I'm doing a poor job of it, no matter how I choose to feed my child.
It is true, though, that breast-feeding does benefit the nursing child in a number of ways that formula cannot. The article continues to discuss recent public efforts to raise the percentage of mothers who breast-feed immediately, in hopes of raising the percentage of those who continue to do so until the six- and twelve-month marks. Ms. Lepore transitions in the later portion of the article into corporate practices that discourage women from continuing to nurse. "To follow a doctor's orders, a woman who returns to work twelve weeks after childbirth has to find a way to feed her baby her own milk for another nine months. The nation suffers, in short, from a Human Milk Gap. There are three ways to bridge that gap: longer maternity leaves, on-site infant child care, and pumps. Much effort has been spent implementing option No. 3, the cheap way out." It was with that sentence that I became skeptical of her stance. The sad truth is that working women are constantly balancing between being bad mothers and bad feminists. The issue of whether a woman should sacrifice her career for her child is still one that remains heavily in contention. To become a stay-at-home mom can be painted as throwing away all the work our foremothers did for us, while to put the kid in daycare and commit to a full-time job can be similarly chastised as negligent. Women are stuck, to put it simply, between a rock and a hard place. The pump is a product of its time; if a woman wants to have a career and a family, here is something that allows her to do both. And to me, a woman who can have a job and raise a child is one who is enormously admirable. To criticize her is not just to be unappreciative of the chaos that she must routinely work through, but to ignore it entirely. And if the pump is her method of choice, I do not feel that anyone can legitimately call it the "cheap way out."
I agree with some of Ms. Lepore's other arguments, primarily that all of these options should be available and the choices surrounding breastfeeding, therefore, should be entirely the mother's to make. If breast-feeding is going to be encouraged by the government, the very act must not be considered publicly obscene. Women should be able to have their children nearby in the workplace, if they please; I think daycare centers within a corporate office building are a wonderful compromise. "Lactation rooms," which are private rooms in which a mother may pump her milk within the workplace, are becoming increasingly common; in fact, the article points out, Oregon was recently the first state to require them in companies that employ over twenty-five people. Motherhood is about making these sort of personal decisions, and I believe all of these options should be readily available. To decry one as inferior to another, however, is a disservice to these hard-working women and undermines the sagacity of the mothers that choose that particular route.
What really makes me angry, however, is a small comment in parentheses that Ms. Lepore makes that almost entirely discredits her. "The National Organization for Women wants more pumps at work: NOW's president, Kim Gandy, complains that 'only one-third of mega-corporations provide a safe and private location for women to pump breast milk for their babies.' (When did 'women's rights' turn into 'the right to work?')." I blinked in disbelief at that statement, thinking I must have misread it, but there it was, in the same black ink as the rest of the magazine. Ms. Lepore, are you kidding me? Can you possibly be serious? Is this some sort of ineffective satire on your part? "Women's rights" have always included "the right to work." The right to embark on any career path. The right to be a doctor instead of a nurse or a professor instead of a school-teacher. The right to keep your job even if you're pregnant and unmarried, the right to make the same amount of money as your male counterpart, the right to go into your workplace every day without fear of harassment. Perhaps Ms. Lepore hasn't heard of the glass ceiling. Perhaps she's been disconnected from society for decades. Perhaps, as a successful woman contributing to the New Yorker, she hasn't felt the effects of workplace discrimination herself. But oh, it's there, and to ignore it is to promote dangerous complacency or worse, ignorance of the arduous work that's left to be done. I do not want money automatically deducted from my paychecks for the presumed maternity leave I may or may not take, and I do not want to be denied a promotion because my male bosses think my ability to bear children is a liability to the higher position I will not be getting, and I don't want any other women to suffer those same injustices. And I don't, Ms. Lepore, want women who do pursue their right to work and their right to have a family, both under that same umbrella of "women's rights," to endure jeers from people like you who question their authority, their motherly integrity, and their ability to do both.
Up until a couple of months ago, I had never considered breast-feeding as something that I might personally do should I ever have a child. I was fed exclusively formula, and consider myself to be a perfectly viable human being. The topic came up with a close friend, who reacted to my declaration with horror and insisted that it was wholly selfish not to breast-feed, and that denying my children my own milk would be detrimental to their livelihood and intelligence. After some time, I irascibly snapped that the conversation would necessarily have to end. That my friend had lambasted my personal choice angered me, but the greater cause of my annoyance was the fact that my friend was a man. Men may freely express their opinions on the necessity or lackthereof of breast-feeding-- the article, in fact, quotes men such as Carl Linnaeus, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Benjamin Franklin-- but they don't share its burden. Pardon my being a feminist bitch, but men can never attain real expertise on motherhood. If I become a mother, no man is going to make me feel like I'm doing a poor job of it, no matter how I choose to feed my child.
It is true, though, that breast-feeding does benefit the nursing child in a number of ways that formula cannot. The article continues to discuss recent public efforts to raise the percentage of mothers who breast-feed immediately, in hopes of raising the percentage of those who continue to do so until the six- and twelve-month marks. Ms. Lepore transitions in the later portion of the article into corporate practices that discourage women from continuing to nurse. "To follow a doctor's orders, a woman who returns to work twelve weeks after childbirth has to find a way to feed her baby her own milk for another nine months. The nation suffers, in short, from a Human Milk Gap. There are three ways to bridge that gap: longer maternity leaves, on-site infant child care, and pumps. Much effort has been spent implementing option No. 3, the cheap way out." It was with that sentence that I became skeptical of her stance. The sad truth is that working women are constantly balancing between being bad mothers and bad feminists. The issue of whether a woman should sacrifice her career for her child is still one that remains heavily in contention. To become a stay-at-home mom can be painted as throwing away all the work our foremothers did for us, while to put the kid in daycare and commit to a full-time job can be similarly chastised as negligent. Women are stuck, to put it simply, between a rock and a hard place. The pump is a product of its time; if a woman wants to have a career and a family, here is something that allows her to do both. And to me, a woman who can have a job and raise a child is one who is enormously admirable. To criticize her is not just to be unappreciative of the chaos that she must routinely work through, but to ignore it entirely. And if the pump is her method of choice, I do not feel that anyone can legitimately call it the "cheap way out."
I agree with some of Ms. Lepore's other arguments, primarily that all of these options should be available and the choices surrounding breastfeeding, therefore, should be entirely the mother's to make. If breast-feeding is going to be encouraged by the government, the very act must not be considered publicly obscene. Women should be able to have their children nearby in the workplace, if they please; I think daycare centers within a corporate office building are a wonderful compromise. "Lactation rooms," which are private rooms in which a mother may pump her milk within the workplace, are becoming increasingly common; in fact, the article points out, Oregon was recently the first state to require them in companies that employ over twenty-five people. Motherhood is about making these sort of personal decisions, and I believe all of these options should be readily available. To decry one as inferior to another, however, is a disservice to these hard-working women and undermines the sagacity of the mothers that choose that particular route.
What really makes me angry, however, is a small comment in parentheses that Ms. Lepore makes that almost entirely discredits her. "The National Organization for Women wants more pumps at work: NOW's president, Kim Gandy, complains that 'only one-third of mega-corporations provide a safe and private location for women to pump breast milk for their babies.' (When did 'women's rights' turn into 'the right to work?')." I blinked in disbelief at that statement, thinking I must have misread it, but there it was, in the same black ink as the rest of the magazine. Ms. Lepore, are you kidding me? Can you possibly be serious? Is this some sort of ineffective satire on your part? "Women's rights" have always included "the right to work." The right to embark on any career path. The right to be a doctor instead of a nurse or a professor instead of a school-teacher. The right to keep your job even if you're pregnant and unmarried, the right to make the same amount of money as your male counterpart, the right to go into your workplace every day without fear of harassment. Perhaps Ms. Lepore hasn't heard of the glass ceiling. Perhaps she's been disconnected from society for decades. Perhaps, as a successful woman contributing to the New Yorker, she hasn't felt the effects of workplace discrimination herself. But oh, it's there, and to ignore it is to promote dangerous complacency or worse, ignorance of the arduous work that's left to be done. I do not want money automatically deducted from my paychecks for the presumed maternity leave I may or may not take, and I do not want to be denied a promotion because my male bosses think my ability to bear children is a liability to the higher position I will not be getting, and I don't want any other women to suffer those same injustices. And I don't, Ms. Lepore, want women who do pursue their right to work and their right to have a family, both under that same umbrella of "women's rights," to endure jeers from people like you who question their authority, their motherly integrity, and their ability to do both.