University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 12-2017 Since the time of Eve : La Leche League and communities of mothers throughout history. Joanna Paxton Federico University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Part of the Catholic Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, History of Gender Commons, History of Religion Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Social History Commons, United States History Commons, Women's History Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Federico, Joanna Paxton, "Since the time of Eve : La Leche League and communities of mothers throughout history." (2017). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2848. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2848 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. 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SINCE THE TIME OF EVE: LA LECHE LEAGUE AND COMMUNITIES OF MOTHERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY By Joanna Paxton Federico B.A., University of Notre Dame, 2006 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History Department of History University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky December 2017 Copyright 2017 by Joanna Paxton Federico All rights reserved SINCE THE TIME OF EVE: LA LECHE LEAGUE AND COMMUNITIES OF MOTHERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY By Joanna Paxton Federico B.A., University of Notre Dame, 2006 A Thesis Approved on November 20, 2017 by the following Thesis Committee _________________________________________________ Thesis Director Lara Kelland _________________________________________________ Katherine Massoth _________________________________________________ Diane Pecknold ii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my mother Karen McMinn Paxton and to my grandmothers Joanna Emge McMinn and Peggy Sabel Paxton who showed me three different, wonderful ways to be a mother. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Lara Kelland, for her insight and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank the other members of my thesis committee, Dr. Diane Pecknold, who guided me through an early incarnation of this project, and Dr. Katherine Massoth, who opened my eyes to exciting new avenues for future research. My thanks also go out to Dr. Linda Pollock, my former advisor at Tulane University, who introduced me to the history of motherhood. Many thanks as well to Morgen MacIntosh Hodgetts and the staff of the Special Collections and Archives at DePaul University Library for their help in navigating the La Leche League International records. Finally, I want to thank my husband, Christopher Federico, and my sons, Salvadore and Robert Federico, for their patience and support, and my brother John Paxton for his invaluable babysitting services during my evening classes. iv ABSTRACT SINCE THE TIME OF EVE: LA LECHE LEAGUE AND COMMUNITIES OF MOTHERS THROUGHOUT HISTORY Joanna Paxton Federico November 20, 2017 La Leche League International (LLL) is the oldest and largest breastfeeding support group in the world. This thesis examines how, beginning in 1956, seven Catholic housewives from suburban Chicago built up the institutional knowledge to sustain a cohesive global network of breastfeeding mothers. It also explores how LLL managed this knowledge over time in response to developments in scholarship and changing social conditions. Based on a narrative analysis of LLL publications, this thesis argues that the League’s founders drew selectively from existing bodies of knowledge and from their own cultural perspectives to establish a sense of community among breastfeeding women. They enhanced this feeling of connection by suggesting that women across time and space shared the same embodied experience of breastfeeding. This thesis adds to existing studies on La Leche League by drawing attention to how the organization developed institutional knowledge and deployed collective identity and memory. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLDGEMENTS …………………………………………………………….. iv ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………....v INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………….. 1 I. A BRIEF HISTORY OF LA LECHE LEAGUE …………………………………….8 II. LITERATURE REVIEW……………………………………………………………24 III. BUILDING COMMUNITIES OF MOTHERS…………………………………….49 IV. CREATING INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE………………………………….71 V. SHAPING AND RESHAPING INSTITUTIONAL KNOWLEDGE………………116 CONCLUSION ………………………………………………………………………...144 REFERENCES ………………………………………………………………………...153 CURRICULUM VITA ………………………………………………………………...163 vi INTRODUCTION La Leche League International (LLL) is the world’s oldest and largest breastfeeding support organization. Founded in 1956 by seven housewives in suburban Chicago, the League grew at a phenomenal rate during its first three decades and was instrumental in dramatically increasing breastfeeding rates throughout the world. By the 1980s, LLL boasted over 4,000 local groups in 43 countries, and they had partnered with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to draft accords protecting maternal and child health.1 The League’s expansion over less than thirty years from a small group of mothers chatting in a living room about a relatively taboo subject to a global organization that authored international public health policy reflects remarkable skill in community building and an impressive accumulation of institutional knowledge. This thesis examines how the League created a sense of collectivity among their members and allies and how they amassed and shaped the knowledge that allowed them to so effectively grow their organization in their first thirty years. It also explores how, as the League’s growth slowed in the 1980s, the organization began to reconsider and 1 La Leche League International, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, 3rd ed. (Franklin Park, IL: La Leche League International), 1981, 339-340. For current breastfeeding statistics, see Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity, “Breastfeeding Report Card, Progressing Toward National Breastfeeding Goals, United States, 2016,” (Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control), 2016; For statistics from 1956, see Herman F. Meyer, “Breastfeeding in the United States: Extent and Possible Trend,” Pediatrics 22, no. 1 (1958),116-121. 1 reshape—to a limited extent—its institutional knowledge and the collective memory of its own history in ways designed to appeal to younger generations. I argue that La Leche League increased women’s receptivity to a new, yet traditionalist construction of motherhood by claiming it was neither new nor traditional, but, instead, timeless. They appealed to shared experiences of frustration with mothering in the modern bottle-feeding world and contrasted these with a vague, sometimes mystical sense of connection and power among breastfeeding mothers across time and space. The League’s founders bolstered their credibility by allying themselves with scientific authorities who supported the organization’s vision of a natural, transhistorical model of embodied motherhood. Over time, the organization incorporated new authorities and the perspectives of new generations of mothers into their body of institutional knowledge. However, I argue, they continued to accept new information only to the extent that it reinforced their unchanging universalist construction of motherhood. Motherhood was always at the center of everything La Leche League did as an organization. Although LLL was known as a breastfeeding support organization, infant feeding was only one component of their organizational mission. As encapsulated in their slogan, “good mothering through breastfeeding,” the League’s overall goal was to promote a particular model of mothering that was grounded in breastfeeding but held implications far beyond this single act.2 La Leche League’s ideal was “natural 2 Alternate versions of this slogan include “better mothering through breastfeeding” and simply “mothering through breastfeeding.” This slogan was printed on numerous League publications including in the mastheads of the newsletters La Leche League News and Leaven. Today, the “first concept” of the League’s ten-concept philosophy states, “Mothering through breastfeeding is the most natural and effective way of understanding and satisfying the needs of the baby,” and one of the three points of LLL’s “General Purpose” is “To encourage good mothering through breastfeeding.” See “La Leche 2 mothering,” a highly intuitive set of behaviors, that extended from the profound physical and emotional ties between nursing mothers and their infants.3 The seven “Founding Mothers” believed this type of intensive, embodied motherhood had been largely lost in the twentieth century amid an impersonal modern culture and a mainstream ideal of “scientific mothering,” which favored formula feeding and rigid, hands-off childcare regimens. According to the League’s manual The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, traditional,