Woman: An Intimate Geography (30 page)

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Authors: Natalie Angier

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excessive pride. Women should not "think themselves too
Good
to perform what Nature requires, nor thro' Pride and Delicacy remit the poor little one to the care of a Foster Parent," she said. In the late eighteenth century, Europe was seized by a craze for in-home breastfeeding. Jean Jacques Rousseau attacked women who would not suckle their young as selfish, callous, and that word again unnatural. Linnaeus, celebrant of the mammary gland, condemned the practice of wet-nursing and proclaimed that mothers and infants both benefited from maternal suckling. Medical authorities warned of the dangers of entrusting infants to a stranger's breast, which might be feeding many mouths and satisfying none; and in fact, the rate of mortality among infants farmed out to wet nurses was quite high. Such treatises had a righteous, lecturing tone. "Let not husbands be deceived: let them not expect attachment from wives who, in neglecting to suckle their children, rend asunder the strongest ties in nature," wrote William Buchan in his 1769
Advice to Mothers
. A woman who would not "discharge the duties of a mother" through the literal discharge of her breast "has no right to become a wife." More influential was William Cadogan, whose 1748
Essay upon Nursing
went through several editions in Europe and America. He urged women to follow the laws of ''unerring Nature," and claimed that breastfeeding was troublesome "only for want of proper Method; were it rightly managed, there would be much Pleasure in it, to every Woman that can prevail upon herself to give up a little of the Beauty of her Breast to feed her Offspring." Mothers needed the advice of medical men like himself, he said. "In my Opinion, this Business has been too long fatally left to the Management of Women who cannot be supposed to have proper knowledge to fit them for such a Task." Even Mary Wollstonecraft, in
A Vindication of the Rights of Women
, urged women to breastfeed, claiming that a husband will feel "more delight at seeing his child suckled by its mother, than the most artful wanton tricks could ever raise," the "wanton tricks" being the display of an unused bosom. The importunings of philosophers and physicians were bolstered by the power of the state. In 1793, the French government decreed that if a mother did not breastfeed her child, she would be ineligible for the eighteenth-century equivalent of welfare payments. A year later the German government went further, requiring all healthy women to nurse their young. By the early nineteenth century, motherly

 

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succor was a cult, and highborn women bragged of their commitment to breastfeeding.
Still, at least a few women expressed some ambivalence toward the elevation of the maternal mammary gland. In
Belinda
, an 1801 novel by the British writer Maria Edgeworth, a character named Lady Delacour tells her history to Belinda. Her first child was born dead, she said, because "I would not be kept prisoner" during pregnancy, nor would she cease her zealous pursuit of gaiety. A second starved to death in infancy: "It was the fashion in that time for fine mothers to suckle their own children. . . . There was a prodigious point made about the matter; a vast deal of sentiment and sympathy, and compliments and enquiries. But after the novelty was over, I became heartily sick of the business; and at the end of three months my poor child was sick too I don't much like to think of it it died."
After the eighteenth century, the practice of wet-nursing never regained popularity, but some of the same themes and counterthemes, the fall and rise of the mammary gland's reputation, have been recapitulated in the twentieth century, with the advent of infant formula. Again medical scientists and well-to-do women have led the way in the do-si-do, first by embracing formula as a scientifically designed product that equals and even surpasses breast milk in nutritiousness and purity, and then in rejecting formula as a pallid and possibly harmful substitute for human milk. In America, the oscillation has been extreme. Before 1930, most women breastfed their babies. By 1972, only 22 percent did, and then for just the first few weeks of life. Formula manufacturers must be held partly responsible for the mass acceptance of their wares. They have pushed their cans and powders relentlessly and often unscrupulously. To this day, they dole out formula samples in maternity wards, even as hospital nurses try to instruct new mothers in the art of breastfeeding.
Yet to say that women have been complete dupes of the formula industry is to assume that women are silly, passive, and gullible and that when allowed to choose freely, they will always choose to breastfeed for months or years. My mother bottle-fed her four children, because she tried breastfeeding but hated it, it was so painful. If she'd had more support and instruction, she says now, she would have tried harder. But my mother-in-law, a retired college dean who also bottle-fed her three

 

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children, said she did so because she didn't want to feel like a pair of udders, and she wouldn't do differently today. "Breastfeeding," she said, "was not for me."
Breastfeeding advocates have made spectacular progress, particularly among highly educated women, who now breastfeed their newborns at a rate of about 75 or 80 percent. Many hospitals now offer postpartum nursing instruction. A handful of enlightened companies offer employees facilities where they can breastfeed or pump milk. Breastfeeding has a certain cachet, even sexiness. Former congresswoman Susan Molinari made a show of nursing her infant while carrying out business on the telephone. In 1998, the
New Yorker
ran a Mother's Day cover of a tough, boot-clad, helmeted female construction worker suckling her infant while sitting on a girder high above the city.
This stylishness is decidedly to the good, for infants thrive on breast milk, and any interval of breastfeeding is better than none at all. Still, the tone of some of the La Leche-style literature sounds suspiciously similar to the tracts by Cadogan and Rousseau judgmental and absolutist. Hiromo Goto, a Japanese Canadian novelist, wrote a short story that appeared in
Ms
. magazine in the fall of 1996, about a mother who dislikes breastfeeding. The character describes the weeks of endless pain and bloody nipples, the engorgement, the pressure from her husband and mother-in-law to keep at it regardless; it will get better, easier, more wonderful. I would do it myself if I could! her husband huffs. In the final phantasmagoric scene, she awakens at three in the morning, slices off her swollen breasts, attaches them to her husband's chest, rolls over, and happily goes back to sleep.
Ms
. readers responded to the story with outrage. They threatened to cancel their subscriptions. "It is hard enough to find social support for breastfeeding, without having it cast in such an extremely negative light in a 'feminist' magazine," one reader said. "While I certainly support the right of any woman to do with her body as she chooses, that decision should be made based upon complete and accurate information," another reader said. "Women do not have many opportunities to learn this womanly art [of suckling] in a culture where breastfeeding is discouraged." In other words, a woman can do as she chooses so long as she makes the right choice that is, to breastfeed indefinitely, and at any cost.
Can we not forgo the polemics and exercise a little more maternal

 

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compassion here? In the real world of the two-career family, most women will breastfeed for the first few weeks or months of their baby's life, and then they will supplement or replace breast milk with formula. Like women throughout history, they will do the best they can under the constraints of work, duty, and desire. They will be generous and selfish, mammals and magicians, and they will flow and stop flowing. Whatever they do, they will feel guilty for not doing enough, and they will wish that they too could drink from the breast of Mary or Hera, thus becoming immortal mothers whose children will never die.

 

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9
A Gray and Yellow Basket: The Bounteous Ovary
The ovary is no beauty. Most internal organs jiggle and glow and are rosy pink. The ovary is dull and gray. Even a healthy ovary looks sickly and drained of blood, as though it had given up hope. It is the size and shape of an unshelled almond, but a lumpy and irregular almond. It is scarred and pitted, for each cycle of ovulation leaves behind a white blemish where an egg follicle has been emptied of its contents. The older the woman, the more scarred her pair of ovaries will be. One might argue that the ovaries are no less visually appealing than the male equivalent, the testicles, but that is hardly high praise; recall that Sylvia Plath in
The Bell Jar
likened testicles to poultry gizzards.
So the ovary isn't pretty. So it is gray and pitted and as lumpy as oatmeal. We would expect nothing less of an organ that works as hard as it does, tending to the disparate but joined needs of the known and the possible. The ovary is a seedpod, the domicile of our fixed portion of eggs, and you are supposed to use some of those eggs, inasmuch as life strives to perpetuate itself. The ovary is gray because it alone among residents of the pelvic cavity is not covered with the pinkish peritoneum, the springy membrane that encloses and protects other organs. The ovary cannot be enclosed because it must give up its belongings so often. It gives up eggs, yes, but it gives more than that. It gives up a kind of pudding, a yellowish tapioca of hormones that feed the reproductive cycle and the bodies we own. The ovary operates as a physiological and allegorical bridge between stasis and sexuality, between anatomy and behavior. Through its periodic hormonal emissions, the ovary makes itself known to us. We have looked at the egg. We turn now to its basket.
As Freud and many others have observed, very young children are

 

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more sexual creatures than grade-school children are. A girl of three or four gleefully pokes and prods her body and the bodies of adults. She wants to explore her vagina, her clitoris, her anus, any hole or pole she encounters, and much to the distress of her queasy and hypersensitive parents, she may even ask to touch her father's penis. She is polymorphously perverse, as Freud endearingly put it. If she is going to experience the so-called Electra complex, the female equivalent of the Oedipal complex, when a girl loves her father and wants to vanquish her mother, she may do it during this era of the lewd toddler.
The preschool girl's interest in sex reflects physiology, and the bizarre on-again, off-again dialogue between the gonads and the region of the brain that oversees them. Until girls and boys are three or four, a structure in the hypothalamus called the gonadotropin-releasing hormone pulse generator ticks and tocks and secretes tiny bursts of reproductive hormones. It's like a lighthouse flashing slowly but unerringly in the fog,
blip blip blip;
every ninety minutes or so, out comes another glint of hormones. A girl's ovaries respond to the pulsatile message. They secrete small amounts of ovarian hormones in return. Nothing serious yet, not nearly enough to grow breasts or ovulate, but still the little girl is slightly waggish and slightly erotic. Her body, all bodies, fascinate her.
At the end of toddlerhood, through a mechanism that remains largely mysterious, the pulse generator in the brain shuts down. The clock stops. It ceases to secrete hormone signals. The ovaries too fall silent. They retreat into hibernation. For this reason, as well as through the tutelage of social expectations, the child is likely to turn prudish, to be easily embarrassed by bodily functions, and the thought of touching her father's penis, or any penis, or any part of any boy, may well make her gag. For the next seven years or so, she is an asexual, agonadal creature, blissful and free, the way you are on a journey, when you've left behind one set of cares and have yet to greet the new ones.
The first glimmerings of renewed care and perversity appear at the age of ten, not as a result of gonadal activity but at the behest of another set of organs: the adrenal glands, blood-rich structures that sit atop the kidneys like porkpie hats. Only within the past year or two have researchers discovered the contribution of the adrenals to the first stirrings of adolescence. The adrenals secrete adrenaline, the fire-under-thy-butt hormone, and they also release small doses of sex hormones.

 

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The adrenals mature at around ten years of age, and that is when a child may start fantasizing about sex and forming obsessive crushes on classmates or pop stars or teachers. The body of a ten-year-old girl may be prepubescent, but her brain is recharged, erotic again. (Do you remember? Oh, I remember. I remember fifth grade, when a boy sitting next to me in class dropped his pencil on the floor. He reached down to retrieve it, and when he sat up again he used my leg as a brace, and though I had no feelings for that boy he was small and seemed so much younger than ten still I felt a shock of pleasure run through my body, and I thought to myself, I am going to like sex.) After the adrenals have spoken, there is no turning back, and the pace and the hunger and the noise will only increase. The body will follow the lead of the mind, and it will become sexualized.
At the age of twelve or so, the pulse generator in the hypothalamus is resuscitated, disinhibited. It begins squeezing out packets of hormones again. Just as we don't know what shut it off before kindergarten, we don't know why it starts ticking again. Perhaps cues from the adrenal gland have stimulated it. Or fat may be the culprit. Fat cells release a signaling molecule called leptin, and some experiments have suggested that leptin is the switch that reactivates the brain clock. It is possible that the brain adjudges reproductive readiness by a girl's fat content, and that a girl must attain a certain level of fatness, a certain heft, before she is capable of ovulating. One rule of thumb has long had it that when a girl reaches approximately one hundred pounds, she pubesces, regardless of her height or even her age. Fat girls menstruate earlier than thin girls or athletic girls. If a quarter of those hundred pounds are fat, then we're looking at twenty-five pounds of fat, which represent an energy reserve of 87,000 calories. The demands of pregnancy are about 80,000 calories. In theory, then, the brain may assess the leptin levels leaking forth from a growing girl's adipose tissue and start its metronome beating again at the hundred-pound mark.
Whatever the trigger, the revived hypothalamus is stronger now by far than it was in its nursery days. And stronger still are the ovaries, the gray sacks of heirloom pearls. They are ready to roll. The adrenals can go only so far. The ovaries know no bounds. They are the primary source of sex hormones that sexualize the body. Before the ovaries are able to serve up a viable egg, they are quite adept at dishing out the sex

 

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