ABSTRACT
The answer seems to lie in the feelings and attitudes of mothers towards breast feeding, rather than in economic considerations. The wives of professional and other white-collar workers appear to be strongly influenced by the demands of 'duty' and 'principle'; and breast feeding, often referred to in books and magazines as 'baby's birthright', has the flavour of a moral obligation that they ignore only at the risk of painful guilt feelings. It is 'natural' to breast feed, therefore it must be right; it is of some significance here that while working-class people embrace what used to be the luxuries of civilization-the soft white bread, tinned fruit and so on-it is among the middle classes that we find a return on principle to the home-baked bread and unre:fined foods which used to be the necessary economy measure of the low-income family. This sense of the synonymity of naturalness and goodness is reflected both in the baby books and in the advertisements for baby goods. 'Breast feeding is best feeding. In breast milk Nature has provided the best food for babies' ;I 'Such service to one's offspring is surely one of the most beautiful and wonderful of Nature's plans' ;2 the baby 'should ... not be taken from his mother's breast to be brought up on an alien milk never intended by Nature for him' :3 these quotations are fairly typical of the baby book attitude, while the advertisers extol their 'natural feeding-bottles' and 'natural laxatives', claim naturalness for half-a-dozen shapes of rubber teat and recommend dried milk as 'the nearest to nature'. So middle-class mothers are firmly committed to breast feeding as a matter of principle; whether or not they find the experience enjoyable, few seem to doubt that breast feeding gives children the ideal start in life, and that bottle feeding, however well contrived the formula may be, is at best an inferior substitute. It may be that this attitude is partly the result of reading the baby books, a highly middle-class activity; but it might equally well be argued that the books themselves simply reflect the established middle-class attitudes of their middle-class authors. Be that as it may, the principle that one 'ought' to breast feed seems generally agreed, with the result that only a very 'good' reason for resorting to bottle feeding
will prevent the duty-conscious middle-class mother from feeling guilty about what she regards as her defection; and this is again reflected in the baby books,t most of which are at some pains to assure the mother that, while breast feeding is indubitably best, she need not feel guilty if she really cannot manageit.2
