B. 1926

The Lives They Lived

On the 7:02 a.m. commuter train from Fairfield, Conn., to Manhattan, a woman with scarlet lipstick and chestnut hair slid beside a businessman reading his newspaper. “May I ask you a question?” she said. “What do you think about breast-feeding?” This was the mid-1950s. The woman was Dana Raphael, an anthropologist, a protégée of Margaret Mead and an outspoken feminist who, a decade before Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” refused to take her husband’s name and shunned the conventional wedding her mother planned. She initially also had no intention of following the de rigueur practice of bottle feeding. But after she tried but mostly failed to nurse her firstborn son, she began an anthropological quest that would end up spanning decades: Why was breast-feeding more successful in some cultures than in others?

She posed the question in one way or another everywhere she went. She asked obstetricians and pediatricians, taxi drivers, ministers and factory workers, men and women sitting on park benches and walking down the street, recording it all in a 5-by-7 notebook she kept in her purse. Many people said breast-feeding was “disgusting,” “animalistic” or “not for humans.” Some women told Raphael they were open to trying it but lacked confidence. One-third of the mothers who tried to breast-feed, one doctor told Raphael, failed.

Breast-feeding had been on the wane since World War II as breasts became increasingly sexualized (pinup girls, Marilyn Monroe, Playboy magazine) and less functional: Doctors and formula manufacturers promoted formula as the scientific, modern, convenient method. If you were a young mother in 1950s suburban America, after leaving the maternity ward you were largely left alone to figure out life with a newborn. There was a good chance your own mother hadn’t breast-fed. Or your sisters. Or your friends. Your pediatrician may have discouraged it. In the meantime, you were setting up the diaper service, doing laundry, cooking and cleaning, entertaining visitors bearing gifts and sending out birth announcements. How much easier to mix some evaporated milk, sugar and water than to puzzle out the mysteries of nursing.

It was far different in much of the world. In parts of East Asia, new moms returned to their parents’ home for weeks to be cared for. In the Latin American tradition of la cuarentena, postpartum women were encouraged to refrain from household work and sex for 40 days while relatives helped tend to mother and baby. In some cultures, the family brought a new mother special food to help her gain strength, while in others, elders shared their knowledge about how to care for the baby. All of it served to “mother the mother,” as Raphael put it, and insulate her from daily pressures so she could relax and — by extension — breast-feed.

Until age 89, Raphael took ballet barre classes three times a week with her son, who is the artistic director of the Connecticut Ballet.

“That’s a doula,” an elderly Greek woman told Raphael in the late 1950s when Raphael explained the concept. The Greek word meant “female servant,” and Raphael used it in her 1966 dissertation on cross-cultural practices of breast-feeding and later popularized it in her book “The Tender Gift: Breastfeeding.”

By then, Raphael was a breast expert (or as some professors at Columbia, where she got her Ph.D., disparagingly called her: the Tit Lady). When her second son was born, as if to make up for lost time, she nursed him for five years. She did it again when she and her husband adopted their daughter, Jessa. To get her breasts to relactate, Raphael, who had interviewed more than 40 adoptive mothers about the process, massaged her breasts, drank lots of water (and wine with seltzer to relax) and borrowed a friend’s baby to nurse.

She was an early critic of Nestlé and other companies in the 1970s for pushing formula in developing countries where women often diluted it or mixed it with tainted water. But she wasn’t a zealot. Working with the Human Lactation Center, which she founded with Margaret Mead, Raphael led a team of anthropologists who interviewed women around the world and discovered that many undernourished women were unable to breast-feed or too preoccupied with the basics of survival to find the time to do so. Formula, in other words, saves lives, too.

For Raphael, it was primarily about giving women options, including to breast-feed where and when they wanted. Raphael certainly did so: at the dinner table of her disapproving mother, during academic meetings, at the ballet and the opera, at parties, on the commuter train. She unbuttoned her blouse and opened it up. No embarrassment, no shame. No barriers between that baby and those very functional breasts.

Maggie Jones is a contributing writer for the magazine and a visiting assistant professor in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.