The Mansion of Happiness (10 page)

One reason so many women stopped breast-feeding after a matter of weeks was that, in the United States, more than half of the mothers of infants under six months old were leaving home to go to work—a change that began with industralization and the age of
machines, which separated home from work. The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act guaranteed only twelve weeks of (unpaid) maternity leave, and, in marked contrast to established practice in other industrial nations, neither the government nor the typical employer offered much more. The 2010 Health Care Act required employers to “provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for her nursing child for 1 year after the child’s birth
each time such employee has need to express the milk” and “a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-workers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk”; but it was not clear how that would work out, as a matter of enforcement.
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To follow doctor’s orders, a woman who returned to work twelve weeks after childbirth had to find a way to feed her baby her own milk for another nine months. The nation suffered, in short, from a Human Milk Gap.

There were three ways to bridge the gap: longer maternity leaves, on-site infant child care, and pumps. Much effort was spent on the cheap way out: option 3. At the turn of the century, Medela distributed pumps in ninety countries, but its biggest market, by far, was the United States, where maternity leaves were so short, unpaid, and unsanctioned that many women, blue-, pink-, and white-collar alike, returned to work just weeks after giving birth. (Breasts supply milk in response to demand; if a woman is unable to put her baby to her breast regularly, she will stop producing milk. Expressing not only provides milk to be stored for times when she is away, it also makes it possible for a working woman to keep nursing her baby at night and on the weekends.) In 1998, Congress had authorized states to use food stamp funds granted to the USDA’s Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program to buy
breast pumps for eligible mothers.
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Studies reported that breast-feeding rates rose with maternal age, education, and income. Medela offered a Corporate Lactation Program, which included free advice for employers seeking to reduce absenteeism and health insurance costs by establishing “Mother’s Rooms.” These would be equipped, ideally, with super-duper electric pumps because “breastpumps with double-pumping options save time and can even help increase a mother’s milk supply.” The loss of productivity, Medela promised, would be slight: “If each employee uses safe, effective, autocycling breastpumps, each visit to the Mother’s Room should last no longer than 10 to 15 minutes.”
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Even more intensive was the energy directed toward legislative reform. By 2008, forty-seven states had passed laws about breast-feeding. Most had to do with option 3. Must companies supply employees with refrigerators to store milk expressed during the workday, else it spoil? Twenty-one states, along with Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, required employers to make a “reasonable effort” to accommodate nursing mothers and their bottled milk. These laws, however, were generally toothless: the National
Zoo’s compliance consisted of putting a chair and a curtain in a ladies’ room. (The posher the employer, the plusher the pump station. Baristas at Starbucks had to barricade themselves in loos intended for customers, while traders at Goldman Sachs could go online to reserve half-hour slots in designated lactation rooms.)
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In 2007, Oregon became the first state to pass a law requiring companies with more than twenty-five employees to provide “non-bathroom” lactation rooms. (A national media campaign asked, reasonably enough, if you wouldn’t make your kid a sandwich in a public restroom, why would you expect a woman to express her baby’s milk in one?)
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In
California, the comedian
Will Ferrell toted his wife’s pump to the Golden Globe ceremony, though whether the Beverly Hilton has a dedicated, non-bathroom lactation room was a matter of hospitality and not of law. Did nursing in public violate state
obscenity laws? In most places, no. In 2009, Virginia and Maryland joined twenty-three other states in exempting women who expose their breasts while suckling infants from indecency laws. Whether pumping in public is obscene had not yet been tested—and, honestly, who would want to?—but, what with all these lactation rooms, that seemed off the table.
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More rules were under consideration. Could a woman or her employer get a tax break for producing or storing milk, some kind of dairy subsidy? Maryland exempted breast pumps from its sales tax, but Congress was deadlocked over the Breastfeeding Promotion Act, introduced in 2007 and again in 2009. The goals of the bill were four: to add the word “lactation” to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; to define lactation as “the feeding of a child directly from the breast or the expressing of milk from the breast”; to provide a tax credit of up to $10,000 per year for companies that provide pumps to their employees; and to set and enforce performance standards and safety rules for pumps.
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A better title for the proposed legislation might have been the Breast Pump Promotion Act. Some breast-feeding advocates argued that human milk fell under Article 25 of the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care.”
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Expressing and drinking human milk, these people insisted, are human rights, but baby food had, by now, become a partisan trigger issue. In 2010, the IRS decided that flexible spending health care funds could not be used to buy breast pumps, the
Times
reporting that the health care consultant
Roy Ramthun (who worked at the Treasury Department) said tax officials were worried about allowing breaks for something that could be classified as food.
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In 2011,
Michelle Obama’s support for breast pump tax breaks inspired Tea Party congresswoman and presidential aspirant Michele Bachmann to rejoin, “To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump— You want to talk about nanny state, I think we just got a new definition.”
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When people talk about machines, everything seems new, even when it’s old.

Breast pumps aren’t sinister; they can be useful, even indispensable and, in some cases, lifesaving. But a thing doesn’t have to be underhanded to feel cold-blooded. How different is a “boob cube” at the Capitol from a Hatchery? To be hooked up to a breast pump is to be chained to the age of the machine. Non-bathroom lactation rooms are so shockingly paltry a substitute for maternity leave, you might think that the Second Gilded Age’s craze for pumps— especially the government’s pressing them on poor women while giving tax breaks to big businesses—would have been met with skepticism by more people than Tea Partiers. Not so. The growth of the breast pump industry was not only not questioned by women’s groups but had, in fact, been urged by them.
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The National Organization for Women wanted more pumps at work; NOW president
Kim Gandy complained, “Only one-third of mega-corporations provide a safe and private location for women to pump breastmilk for their babies.”
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What ever happened to asking for more than a closet?

The difference between employer-sponsored lactation programs and flesh-and-blood family life is stark. Breast-feeding involves cradling and cuddling your baby; pumping involves cupping plastic shields on your breasts and watching your nipples squirt milk down a tube. Rhode Island’s Physicians’ Committee for Breastfeeding gave an annual award for the most Breastfeeding-Friendly Workplace, a merit measured, in the main, by the comforts provided in pumping rooms; for instance, the Gold Medal winner’s “soothing room” was equipped with “a sink, a lock on the door, and literature.” It appeared no longer within the realm of the imaginable that, instead of running water and a stack of magazines, “breastfeeding-friendly” could mean making it possible for women and their babies to be together. Some lactation rooms even went so far as to make a point of banning actual
infants and toddlers, lest mothers smuggle them in for a quick nip. At the
University of Minnesota, staff members with keys could pump their milk at the “Expression Connection,” but the sign on the door bore this warning: “This room is not intended for mothers who need a space to nurse their babies.” When Playtex debuted a breast pump called the Embrace, no one bothered to scream, or even to murmur, that something you plug into a wall socket is a far cry from a whisper and a kiss.

Is milk medicine? Is suckling love? Of all questions about life and death, taxonomical questions are some of the trickiest. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, breast pumps were handy; they were also a handy way to avoid a politically unpalatable topic about the artificiality of modern life: Is it the mother or her milk that matters more to her baby? Meanwhile,
mamma ex machina:
Medela offered a breakthrough model with “2-Phase Expression.” Phase one “simulates the baby’s initial rapid suckling to initiate faster milk flow”; phase two “simulates the baby’s slower, deeper suckling for maximum milk flow in less time.” These newest machines, the company promised, “work less like a pump and more like a baby.”
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More like a baby? Holy cow. We are become our own
wet nurses.

A
nne Carroll Moore was born long ago but not so far away, in Limerick, Maine, in 1871. She had a horse named Pocahontas, a father who read to her from
Aesop’s Fables
, and a grandmother with no small fondness for
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Annie, whose taste ran to
Little Women
, was a reader and a runt. Her seven older brothers called her Shrimp. In 1895, when she was twenty-four, she moved to New York,
where she more or less invented the children’s library.
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At the time, you had to be fourteen, and a boy, to get into New York’s Astor Library, which opened in 1854, the same year as the Boston Public Library, the country’s first publicly funded city library, where you had to be sixteen. Even if you got inside, the librarians would shush you, carping all the while about how the “young fry” read nothing but “the trashy”: Scott, Cooper, and Dickens. (One century’s garbage being,
as ever, another century’s Great Books.)
Samuel Tilden, who, before his death, in 1886, left his $2.4 million fortune to “establish and maintain a free library and reading room in the city of New York,” nearly changed his mind when he found out that 90 percent of the books charged out of the BPL were fiction. Meanwhile,
libraries were popping up in American cities and towns like crocuses at first melt. Between 1881
and 1917,
Andrew Carnegie underwrote the construction of more than sixteen hundred public libraries in the United States, buildings from which children were routinely turned away on the grounds that they were noisy, messy, and careless but chiefly because they needed to be protected from books, especially novels, which would corrupt their morals. Something had to be done. In 1894, at the annual meeting of the
American Library Association,
established in 1876, the Milwaukee Public Library’s
Lutie Stearns read a “Report on the Reading of the Young.” Stearns wondered, What if age limits were lifted? What if libraries were to set aside special books for children, shelved in separate rooms for children, “staffed by attendants
who liked children
”?
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In 1896, Moore, who didn’t exactly like children but who did care about them—and who, in any case, needed a job—was given the task of running just such an experiment. The Children’s Library of the
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn was the first library in the country whose architectural plans included space for children, and this at a time when the Brooklyn schools’ policy stated, “Children below the third grade
do not read well enough to profit from the use of library books.” Moore toured kindergartens—those rooms
Milton Bradley was busy supplying with crayons and scissors and paper cutters—and made a list of what she needed for her room: tables and chairs sized for children, not grown-ups; plants, especially ones with flowers; artwork; and very, very good books.
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The year before Moore started at Pratt, the Astor and Lenox libraries and the Tilden Trust had joined forces to form the New York Public Library. Its cornerstone was laid, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, in 1902. Four years later, when the library’s directors established the Department of Work with Children, they hired Moore to serve as its superintendent, a position in which she not only oversaw the children’s programs at all of the branch
libraries—including sixty-five paid for by a Carnegie bequest of $5.2 million—but also planned the Central Children’s Room. After the New York Public Library opened its doors, in 1911, its Children’s Room became a pint-sized paradise, with its pots of pansies and pussy willows and oak tables and candlelit corners and much-coveted window seats, so low to the floor that even the shortest legs didn’t dangle.
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All this depended on the so-called
discovery of childhood.
Stages of life are artifacts, ideas with histories: the unborn, as a stage of life anyone
could picture, dates only to the 1960s;
adolescence is a useful contrivance; midlife is a moving target; senior citizens are an interest group; and tweenhood is just plain made up. There have always been children, of course, but in other times
and places, people have thought about them differently. The idea that children are born innocent and need protection from the world of adults is a product of the
Enlightenment. You can trace it, as a matter of child-rearing advice (in English, anyway), to
John Locke’s 1693 treatise
Some Thoughts Concerning Education.
Locke thought children needed to learn through play. “The chief Art,” he argued, “is to
make all that they have to do, Sport and Play, too.” Even reading could be taught to children, he thought, without them ever “perceiving it to be anything but a Sport.” Locke is why, beginning in 1744, the London printer
John Newbery published books aimed to amuse and entertain children, including Mother Goose stories, Perrault’s tales,
Aesop’s Fables
,
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes
, and a serial, the
Lilliputian Magazine.
When
John Wallis printed the New Game of Human Life in 1790, he was following Locke’s advice and Newbery’s footsteps: teaching children about the journey of life by making it a game.
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