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Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breast-feeding in the 19th and 20th Centuries By Jacqueline H. Wolf (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2001) (290 pages; $64.95 cloth; $24.95 paper)
Jacqueline Wolf's Don't Kill Your Baby relates the sad history of women's switch from breast to bottle-feeding in the United States. Wolf argues that women of all classes, not physicians, instigated the move from breast to bottle as they responded to economic pressures, conflicts rooted in class disparities, and changing views related to time management, sex, and marriage.
Wolf's study reports that the switch from breast to bottle-feeding occurred during a period in which babies were dying of infant diarrheal disease in epidemic numbers in the summer months. Her book describes the role that contaminated milk played in the high rates of infant mortality from such diarrheal disease. Wolf describes the dangers of a contaminated milk supply before mandated pasteurization and the establishment of government standards for the collection, transport, and bottling of milk. She also provides insight into the political struggle between farmers and public health officials that pitted profit against public health. Her chapters on the commercialization of infant feeding and the business of selling human milk substitutes in the form of cow's milk and artificial infant foods further develop the role of profit in the switch from breast to bottle-feeding of infants. Finally, Wolf does an excellent job explicating the process through which male pediatricians displaced women as the managers of infant feeding.
Wolf is at her best when she explores the history of wet nursing during this period, showing how class divisions created a situation in which poor women's babies died so that "better off children could live. She tells the poignant stories of poor wet nurses forced to place their own babies in institutions where they were artificially fed and frequently perished, while the wet nurses' abundant milk supply succored other women's children. Wolf's thesis that women themselves drove the move away from breast-feeding centers around the rancor such mothers felt toward wet nurses: the fact...