Breastfeeding in American Women’s Literature

By cataloguing scenes in which characters breastfeed across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, this book studies the beliefs, fantasies, and concerns betrayed by their writers, and it charts the many consistent and competing cultural ideologies that accrue over the years and find expression in breastfeeding scenes

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Rather than rarities, literary depictions of women breastfeeding infants are more common in American literature than recognized. In some cases, readers have dismissed such portrayals as scenic background or strokes of verisimilitude. In other cases, we have failed to register them at all. By cataloging and closely reading scenes of characters breastfeeding across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, this book decodes the beliefs of writers as celebrated as Willa Cather, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich and as current as Camille Dungy, Maggie Nelson, and Torrey Peters. It traces in these authors’ fantasies and fears the consistent and sometimes competing cultural ideologies that accrue over decades and find expression in breastfeeding scenes. Despite the different historical and cultural expectations of what a mother should be and do, twentieth century and twenty-first century women writers have consistently singled out maternal pleasure—a mother’s privileging of her own desire—as the most important theme attending scenes of breastfeeding.