A dozen or so years since the emergence of the feminist blogosphere, it’s no surprise that a book about “lactivists”—the most fervent of breastfeeding advocates—contains a preponderance of stories from the “mommy wars.” A New York City cocktail party where an aggressive member of La Leche League literally backs an expectant mother (our insufficiently enthusiastic author) into a corner? Check. A new mom so distraught over her lactation failure that she preemptively defends herself to strangers in a pediatric waiting room? That too. A woman bottle-feeding her baby on a subway (under a “breast is best” campaign poster, no less) who hears a fellow traveler mutter that people like her shouldn’t be allowed to have kids? Yep. One of the daughters of folk-singing trio Peter, Paul and Mary responding to Hurricane Sandy by calling for a lactation consultant to visit housing projects in the Rockaways? Why not!



These are the type of stories we’ve come to expect, after years of debate about competitive middle-class parenting that has made breastfeeding—and the backlash against it—a central issue. Courtney Jung, a University of Toronto political science professor, has catalogued these incidents thoroughly in her new book, Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy, along with a host of bourgie excesses worthy of the last days of Rome. There are $20 cookies intended to help women produce milk, and $20 scoops of breast milk ice cream, made from the milk of women who have pumped more than they can use. If you want to roll your eyes at upper-middle class consumer culture, and the one-upmanship of people who can’t leave each other’s parenting choices alone, Jung has you covered.

But Jung’s more interesting findings relate to what the decision between nursing and formula has become in contemporary U.S. society, where, she writes, “Breastfeeding is never just breastfeeding.” It’s also a moral marker, distinguishing good parents from bad, and it’s a status symbol that, unconsciously in some cases, lionizes the choices of white college-educated parents. And it’s a “consensus issue” that unites left, right and middle in shared support of breastfeeding, even if for different reasons (empowerment for feminists, submission and faithfulness for conservative Christians, and global-mindedness for environmentalists). “The truth is that in the United States,” Jung writes, “breastfeeding has become much more than simply a way to feed a baby. It is a way of showing the world who you are and what you believe in.”

Decisions about how to feed and care for infants have long been informed by class dynamics. When Victorian-era women sent their children to wet-nurses, it was because breastfeeding was seen as the province of the lower classes. When 1950s housewives turned to formula, it was a signal that they’d embraced a form of advanced, scientific motherhood, casting mothers who continued to breastfeed as backwards and unsophisticated.

“One of the striking features of breastfeeding history is that this longstanding demographic trend has now been almost completely reversed,” Jung writes, as it’s now predominantly wealthy, white, college-educated women who breastfeed, while poorer women, and women of color, rely in greater numbers on formula. What has stayed the same is that one version of parenting is viewed as better. And as the CDC, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Surgeon General have all come forward to declare that breastfeeding is not just a matter of preference, but something that concerns the entire country—since the health benefits said to be associated with breastfeeding would ultimately result in fewer health problems for children, and greater productivity for their working parents—Jung writes that formula feeding has become equated “with smoking and unsafe sex as a form of risky behavior that threatens not only individual health but American society at large.”