ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author begins by asking the meaning of mother’s milk in Enlightenment writing about maternal breast-feeding, and argues that the Rousseauian sexual ideology associated with it leads to unresolved problems in Revolutionary thinking about women. She sketches a semiotic reading of the representations of the Republic as a nursing mother that figure in the festivals and allegories of the French Revolution, where anxieties about controlling women intersect with anxieties about purifying—about revolutionizing—signs themselves. The author also argues that questions involving breast-feeding that present themselves in the body of psychoanalytic writing represented by Freudian theory may also be interestingly related to quite another set of questions, however, that bear on the relationship beween history and psychoanalysis. Emile suggests how Enlightenment advocacy of breast-feeding such as Rousseau’s can coincide with conservative views of the family and with a consolidation of women’s traditional role within it; bringing up baby—a prelude to educating the natural man—means disciplining the mother.
