Now, just to put this in perspective, my friend is a pretty sophisticated urbanite. He has an MFA from Parsons. He is a self-proclaimed metrosexual. He has posed nude for his girlfriend, a photographer. He loves babies and is looking forward to having a few. He is not the kind of guy you would peg as having many hang-ups about lactation. And yet both he and his girlfriend, an equally enlightened individual, through much nervous laughter, told us how awkward it was to be face to face, teaching these women about the color wheel while between them a baby suckled at a breast.
Pondering their discomfort and remembering my own pre-motherhood, I decided to ask an expert on the anthropology of breastfeeding if nursing women around the world — for example, in Cote D'Ivoire, where Alma Gottlieb, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, conducted extensive field work — felt the need to conceal their breasts or seclude themselves while nursing. I'd spent eighty bucks on a Hooter Hider I never used and endured more than a few hours trying to balance my infant in a public toilet stall, a grungy department store "ladies' lounge" or simply sequestered off in a corner, alone, as though I were engaged in some unsightly act of personal hygiene. Do women in Cote D'Ivoire do such things?
Gottlieb is a soft-spoken woman with a lovely laugh that rang out like a bell at this question: "That would be absurd," she explained. "The idea alone would elicit peals of laughter." In the villages of West Africa where she lived, "The rights of the breast belong to the baby. It is simply not an erotic part of the body."
I began to re-imagine how my nursing experience might have been different if, above and beyond feeling comfortable nursing at a dinner party, I'd been able to walk around topless all summer, or whip out my "un-eroticized" breast in the teacher's lounge of my college, or nurse in the middle of a restaurant without blanket, without cloak, without feeling like I was embarrassing, at least a little, the friends or family at my table.
"If I hadn't lived in Africa, I'm sure I wouldn't have breastfed in public."
How ridiculous it all began to seem — so much fuss over a glandular organ as functional as any other, an organ that, after all, has a far more primal purpose than filling out a strapless dress or selling Budweiser. I imagined the women of West African villages looking at the enlightened mama cloaked in a Hooter Hider or nursing in the bathroom with that same mix of sympathy and bewilderment and condescension I catch myself using on a Muslim woman trudging through the summer heat in a black burqa. Oh, I thought, how myriad and wondrous are the ways different cultures come up with to make things inconvenient for their fairer sex.
"One last question," I said to Alma Gottlieb at the conclusion of our interview. "Did seeing what you saw in Africa embolden you when you returned to the States and became a nursing mother yourself?"
"It did," she said without hesitation. "If I hadn't lived in Africa, I'm sure I wouldn't have breastfed in public. But I knew a way of doing this that made a lot more sense. And in another part of the world, I knew people were not uptight about it. The feminist in me said women have a right to breastfeed and babies have a right to be breastfed and because we lead busy lives, we have to do it in public."
"So you breastfed everywhere?" I asked.
"Almost. I never breastfed while teaching a class or in a faculty meeting. In another life I might, but in this one, I wasn't quite that bold."
