ABSTRACT
The philosophy of “attachment parenting,” which validates attentive, embodied care for infants, offers women set of norms by which to structure their “identity work” in congruence with an over-arching framework of intensive mothering. The argument is that while the endorsement of breastfeeding by women in London is a magnification of a more generalized “intensive parenting” culture in the U.K., which encourages absorbed “sacrificial” parenting on the part of mothers, the same mothering looks very different in Paris. Badinter’s analysis of shifting orthodoxies around motherhood is useful, although it does not highlight the struggle of many French women who would like to spend more time with their children in the months—attachment parents or otherwise—and who resent the social pressure to return to work. Strong feelings about feeding are derived from the fact that it operates as a “signal issue,” which boxes women off into different parenting “camps”.
