Reviews for Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures: Eight Volume Set

The average rating for Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures: Eight Volume Set based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-12-20 00:00:00 Chip Wilhelm A few days after my son was born, a friend texted me in the middle of a big snowstorm to ask if I needed anything. "A snowblower and a wet nurse," I told her. She had a snowblower, but we couldn't have found a wet nurse even if we'd tried. Why not? Wet nursing has been around forever, both as paid work and as an unpaid social relationship. Some cultures continue to acknowledge the existence of "milk siblings," biologically unrelated children who have nursed from the same woman's breast and who therefore cannot marry one another, but whose milk-sibling status binds their respective families in other ways. And, after decades of dominance by artificial infant foods -- proprietary mixtures sold by formula companies as well as DIY, mix-at-home recipes for "scientific" infant feeding -- breastfeeding is experiencing a resurgence. A large part of why so many more U.S. women are breastfeeding, and breastfeeding longer, than in recent past decades, is because of a new awareness of the health benefits of breastmilk. If breastmilk is so great for public health, and if wet nursing has such a long history, what happened? This book covers wet nursing from the colonial period up to the 1930s, when artifical feeding methods took center stage. The epilogue looks briefly at modern milk banking as the descendant of wet nursing, in which banked milk is viewed not as a commodity produced by women and from which women can profit, but as a gift which women produce and can give to a baby in need, but should never sell. I couldn't possibly do the book justice by trying to summarize it, but as somebody who finds a lot of the public discourse around breastfeeding (both pro and con) extremely offputting from a feminist perspective, it was fascinating to learn about how infant feeding has been infused with moralizing at least since white folks came to this country. Some of today's pro-breastfeeding conversation is startlingly similar to colonial perspectives on breastfeeding: a woman has a duty to her baby to nurse him, and a woman who does not or cannot is morally suspect. Some contemporary anti-breastfeeding sentiments appear far back in the historical record, too: husbands who insist that their wives wean to a wet nurse early, or not nurse their own babies at all, so that the husband can resume his sexual control of his wife's body and fertility. The book rightfully spends the majority of its pages discussing various class-related problems related to wet nursing, which is especially interesting given today's vastly divergent breastfeeding rates between wealthier and poor U.S. women, and differing rates between Black and white women. One shortcoming of the book is that it focuses almost exclusively on wet nursing in urban areas. I expect that's likely because only urban areas could support large maternity infrastructure like lying-in hospitals and wet nurse employment bureaus, and because very little likely exists in the historical record with respect to wet nursing in rural areas, where any cross-family nursing was likely to be informal, either because it was exclusively a social, unpaid transaction or because its paid participants connected directly with families and not through institutions that would have created records of that work. But this shortcoming is not really addressed, and it is a significant hole, considering that during most of the time period covered by the book more Americans lived in rural areas than urban ones.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-24 00:00:00 Lance Hernandez Ordered this on inter-library loan after reading several excerpts from it in The Lady of Milkweed Manor. Not what you'd call a page turner, but a really interesting look at the progression of infant feeding from wet nursing to formula with a few diversions along the way about society's changing views on nature versus nurture, the role of the physician in child-rearing decisions, and the moral implications of allowing an infant to "fail to thrive" without human milk.