Mother’s Milk and Male Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century French Narrative

Should all mothers breast-feed their children? This question remains controversial in the twenty-first century. In an interview with the newspaper Liberation in 2010, feminist philosopher Elisabeth Badinter claimed that the pressure to breast-feed signified “a reduction of woman to the status of an animal species, as though we were all female chimpanzees.” The debate over maternal nursing held even more urgency before pasteurization provided a safe alternative in the early 1900s. While scholars