{"id":2161,"date":"2015-09-17T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2015-09-17T08:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=2161"},"modified":"2015-09-17T14:21:54","modified_gmt":"2015-09-17T14:21:54","slug":"behind-the-breast-pumping-supermom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2015\/09\/17\/behind-the-breast-pumping-supermom\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the Breast Pumping Supermom"},"content":{"rendered":"

I traveled to Winthrop University\u00a0five\u00a0months after my baby was born to talk to faculty and students about women\u2019s unique needs during disaster. I was flying with my electric breast pump, which would both save me from the horrifying pain of engorgement and allow me to avoid dumping what women\u2019s health practitioners call \u201cliquid gold.\u201d I am not a \u201cbreast is best\u201d advocate; I\u2019m a \u201cwhatever-the-mother-wants-to-do\u201d advocate. Women, after all, already experience a lot of pressure around what it means to be a good mother, and research<\/a> shows that the discrepancies between their expectations (like breastfeeding) and their experiences (finding breastfeeding difficult, impossible, painful, frustrating, and just plain not wanting to do it) causes stress, unhappiness, feelings of failure, and affects their overall experiences of motherhood.<\/p>\n

\"Look<\/a>
Look how easy it is\/Blogs.babycenter.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Older women have oohed and ahhed over my pump, wishing they had something so efficient when their children were babies. Indeed, I came home from the hospital with a manual pump that was completely useless (the only pump my insurance covered<\/a>), and I wondered how the generation before me didn\u2019t chuck them in the fire just to watch them burn (yes, they are that bad). To these women, I was a \u201cgood\u201d mother\u2014a mother so dedicated to breastfeeding my child that I was able to bridge my work and my motherly duties. If I was going to insist on working outside of the home, they suggested, at least I was still putting my baby first. There is no short supply of family and friends who applaud mothers of infants for toting their pumps to work, and who tsk-tsk women for forgoing breastfeeding (or, ironically, for breastfeeding \u201ctoo long\u201d).<\/p>\n

The portable electric breast pump symbolizes the supposed freedom of contemporary mothers and conjures up the image of the Supermom<\/a> who juggles it all seamlessly: work, family, husband. Supermom\u2019s repertoire notably does not include self-care, which reflects the cultural conflation of motherhood with martyrdom and ignores women\u2019s experiences of postpartum depression<\/a>, anxiety<\/a>, and OCD<\/a>. (see also, Trina\u2019s post on maternal mental health<\/a>). What these women didn\u2019t see, though, was me anxiously looking for space to pump while I traveled. Considering that we as a society are so quick to demand women breastfeed, the lack of such space is both curious and telling.<\/p>\n

In the United States, we promote conflicting and constraining ideas about women\u2019s bodies as heterosexually titillating or maternal<\/a>\u2014and which never really belong to them. We show breasts when they are represented as for men, but mothers should hide their breasts by investing in shawls or nursing in dirty public restrooms. On the verge of tears, I stood in a dark humid bathroom stall of the Atlanta airport. My pump hung from a small hook on the stall door, drooped open while I stood there pumping into the toilet. There was no way I could get a clean catch in the bacteria filled lavatory. I snapped a blurry selfie with my iPhone and sent the photo along with an expletive filled text to my husband, expressing my frustration with living in an androcentric society built \u201cby men, for men.\u201d The absence of spaces dedicated to traveling families and nursing mothers does not make the airport gender neutral. On the contrary, by not accommodating nursing and pumping mothers, we push them into the recesses of public spaces and contain their bodies in the home. We imply that public spaces are not meant for them and consequently normalize and privilege adult male bodies. At the same time, demanding that women breastfeed marginalizes their physical, emotional, and psychological struggles with motherhood. It also ignores the multifaceted character of women\u2019s lives, which creates pressure to succeed at both home and work.<\/p>\n

\"Supermom\/Christopher<\/a>
Supermom\/Christopher Boswell\/PhotoSpin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During my layover returning home, I walked swiftly around the American Airline terminal, desperately looking for a place to pump. I would have just plugged into the nearest cellphone charge station but was sure that the site of me pumping, even if not showing my breasts, would offend someone. When I passed a room dedicated to smokers\u2014with comfy couches and a flat screen cable television\u2014I was tempted to incite protest. An airline representative looked surprised when I asked her, \u201cWhere do nursing mothers go?\u201d She finally pointed me to a small family restroom, where I could lock the door. It was dirty and there was no place to sit or set up my pump, but at least it was private\u2014that is until people started knocking at the door to get in and jiggling the handle to hurry me up. I hung my head as a woman yelled through the door, \u201cOther people need to get in!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lactation<\/a>
Lactation Room Sign Breastfeedchicaho.wordpress.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Should airports have lactation rooms? Absolutely. So should universities<\/a>, workplaces<\/a>, and other public and private spaces. Sometimes all it takes is a clean room, a cozy chair, an electrical outlet, and a mini-fridge. Of course this requires shifting ideologies around women\u2019s bodies and who has a right to be comfortable in social spaces.\u00a0Lactation rooms don\u2019t make Supermom an attainable ideal and do not excuse people who pressure women about breastfeeding. But they do signal to women and their families that this world is built for them, too. Of course, what might also help is conceptualizing women\u2019s bodies beyond a binary in which they are either exposed heterosexual objects or hidden maternal nurturers. But that\u2019s for another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I traveled to Winthrop University\u00a0five\u00a0months after my baby was born to talk to faculty and students about women\u2019s unique needs during disaster. I was flying with my electric breast pump, which would both save me from the horrifying pain of engorgement and allow me to avoid dumping what women\u2019s health practitioners call \u201cliquid gold.\u201d I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2055,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[218,245,30335,55,34978,3109,30344,3290,175,21925,76],"tags":[37889,102,37890,37886,37893,37854],"class_list":["post-2161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bodies","category-feminism","category-feminist-sociology","category-gender","category-gender-equity","category-motherhood","category-personal-stories","category-pregnancy","category-sociology","category-womens-health","category-work","tag-bodies","tag-breastfeeding","tag-feminism","tag-gender","tag-motherhood","tag-supermom"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2055"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2161"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2196,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161\/revisions\/2196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}