Suckling in Silence: Breastfeeding, Paid Work and Feminist Thought in New Zealand, the United States and Sweden

Abstract

This thesis examines the uneasy relationship between breastfeeding and women's labour market involvement in three industrialised countries - New Zealand, the United States and Sweden - from the early 1970s until the late 1990s. While the primary emphasis is on the New Zealand situation, Sweden and the United States provide a contrasting contextual backdrop in terms of socio-political and economic direction as well as practical policy developments with regard to this integration. This research shows there is a need to develop a set of practical and operational policies to support the integration of breastfeeding and women's labour market involvement. This need has become particularly pressing in New Zealand, given the greater labour market involvement of women with infants under one year of age since the 1990s. A similar situation exists in the United States. However, while feminist groups and organizations have been instrumental in influencing various developments which offer women greater opportunities, self-determination and choice over reproduction, paid employment and political participation, they have been less involved in theorising and activism with regard to breastfeeding. This includes its intersection with women's employment. This neglect can, in part, be explained by the conundrum which the issue of breastfeeding has historically posed for the development of a framework for equality in the workplace. In order to highlight some of the difficulties posed by breastfeeding for feminist theorising and policy development, I explore the representation of breastfeeding within the "equal treatment versus special treatment debates" in the United States during the early and mid-1980s. These debates, which divided feminist theorists, centred upon the reconciliation of childbearing with gender equality in the workplace. Although pregnancy and childbirth were explicitly identified as the chief points of conflict, breastfeeding appeared to represent a site of even greater, albeit often unarticulated, tension. In the New Zealand context, I analyse the representation of breastfeeding in submissions by women's organisations to both the 1980 Maternity Leave and Employment Protection Bill and the 1986 Parental Leave and Employment Protection Bill, as well as in more general labour market and health policy discourse. Unlike the "difference" of pregnancy and its intersection with women's labour market involvement, which had to be inevitably addressed, breastfeeding could be, and often was, regarded as an optional practice, given alternate methods of infant feeding. However, relegating breastfeeding to the realm of individual choice means that many women, particularly those in low paid, low status jobs with insufficient workplace bargaining power, have little or no opportunity to combine breastfeeding and paid employment. I argue that there is a need for governments and employers to develop appropriate and equitable legislation, policies and practices which will assist all women, including those in both the formal and informal employment sectors, to juggle what is, in fact, not just a dual burden but often a "triple burden" of paid work, unpaid work and breastfeeding. Various policy alternatives are identified and discussed. However, there also needs to be explicit support and lobbying by feminist groups and organizations for legislation and policies that would support breastfeeding in the workplace among diverse, but especially disadvantaged, groups of women. To romanticise lower levels of breastfeeding among these groups as a form of cultural resistance to dominant cultural and patriarchal dictates, as some analyses have done, is to legitimate the status quo and the lack of structural support for breastfeeding among working women and to perpetuate a biological disadvantage among both the mothers and babies of these groups. Hence, I conclude that future labour market, health and feminist discussions need to take the integration of breastfeeding and maternal employment into account.