The first week of August marks World Breastfeeding Week, a full seven days of encouraging new mothers to feed their babies from the breast. Are you ladies “pumped” or what? (Heh). Important man angle: “Studies show that the father’s stated preference for breastfeeding was found to be the most important factor influencing a woman’s decision to breastfeed.”
I’m reminded of a section from Mary McCarthy‘s The Group, recently highlighted by Sady Doyle:
In fiction, we have Mary McCarthy’s 1963 novel The Group, in which the fragile Priss has a nervous breakdown because her husband insists she breastfeed their newborn. Priss doesn’t have enough milk; the perpetually hungry baby never stops crying; Priss never stops feeling like a failure. She comes to dislike her husband. (“Up to now [his politics] had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans… But she did not like the thought of a Republican controlling the destiny of a helpless baby.”) She comes to dislike her baby. (“She felt, to her shame, that he was a piece of hospital property that had been dumped on her and abandoned—they would never come to take him away.”)
Get to it, dads!
Photo via National Media Museum
Don't go away!
Just 0.4% of our readers support our work, so we're counting on you. Members make the story you just read, and everything we publish, possible. Will you support local news in 2021?