Introduction

WELCOME TO THE newest edition of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding! This is a book for you, wherever you are in your mothering journey. It’s a book about developing a breastfeeding relationship with your baby, with strategies that help combine breastfeeding with your already busy life, and ideas for meeting any challenges along the way. There’s some science, for sure, but we hope to bring to life the “art” part, the fun part, the way you and your baby figure out your own dance and make this work for you.

Does our title sound old-fashioned? That’s because it’s been around for more than half a century, dating back to 1956, when almost all TV shows were black and white and many countries’ breastfeeding rates were at an all-time low. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding was the first book about breastfeeding for mothers that was written by mothers—seven of them, in fact.

These mothers didn’t start out to write a book. They were enjoying breastfeeding their babies—many of them had bottle-fed earlier children and breastfed later children—and they had all figured out, as mothers always have, that breastfeeding is much easier when we talk about it with friends. So they began holding monthly get-togethers in their homes for other women interested in (shhh) breastfeeding. Because the very word was shocking in those days, they chose a code name: La Leche (lah LAY-chay—Spanish for “the milk”) League, after a shrine in St. Augustine, Florida, Nuestra Señora de la Leche y Buen Parto (Our Lady of the Milk and Good Birth).

That first La Leche League Group quickly became multiple groups. Questions from local mothers became questions from across the country. By 1958, to keep up with the flood, the women had written a simple overview of breastfeeding basics. They made copies, their children helped collate the pages, and the first Womanly Art of Breastfeeding—all thirty-one pages of it—was mailed from their homes. In 1963, just five years later, they wrote a longer version, found a company to print it, and ultimately sold over a million copies.

And so it grew. Today, from Bolivia to Bulgaria, South Africa to Singapore, breastfeeding mothers get together at La Leche League (LLL) gatherings to celebrate, laugh, cry, and learn from one another. They may share some technical advice, but mostly they talk about their daily breastfeeding experiences—life with a new baby, how to get a reasonable night’s sleep, what solids to offer a breastfeeding toddler, what to say to doubting relatives. It’s that sharing of experiences, mother to mother, that has been the heart of every LLL gathering and every edition of the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding from 1958 through today.

We hope this edition will be like a La Leche League meeting: just enough science to light your path and smooth any rough spots in the road, but mostly practical tips and stories from mothers who have been there. As you read it, we hope you’ll think of yourself as being surrounded by all the pregnant women and mothers who are reading it at this same moment, as well as the mothers from the generations before you who have contributed to it. By breastfeeding your baby, you’re joining a sisterhood of mothers that reaches back to our earliest ancestors and forward to future generations.

What Makes This Book Different from Other Breastfeeding Books?

What if you had to choose? You can either bottle-feed your baby with scheduled feedings and little body contact, but with your milk in the bottle. Or you can breastfeed your baby, responding to his cues, but only formula comes out of your breasts.

Which would you choose? You’d be choosing between the product of human milk and the process of breastfeeding … and you couldn’t have both.

Some mothers would choose the milk, for all its protective and health-giving factors. Others would choose breastfeeding because they value the closeness and connection—they just couldn’t imagine raising their child any other way.

There’s no right answer, but in today’s world, many women would automatically choose the product over the process because human milk gets all the glory. Studies of human milk are straightforward; relationships are hard to study. We have tons of research on the importance of a precious fluid that just happens to be delivered from your breast. But this book also celebrates the relationship—the heart of breastfeeding—not just the fluid. Breastfeeding is a connection as well as a food source, a baby’s first human relationship, designed to gentle him into the world with far more than just immune factors and good nutrition. It’s a way of mothering your baby—a relationship that develops feeding by feeding, building trust, closeness, knowledge of each other, and a deeply connected attachment that lasts long after weaning.

Every language has its own word to describe the infant at his mother’s breast. North American English has two: breastfeeding and nursing. Nursing in other English-speaking countries tends to mean cuddling or caring for a baby. Maybe nursing began to mean breastfeeding in North America because it allowed the speaker to avoid the word breast, but we like it because it doesn’t imply that it’s just a feeding method. So in addition to talking about breastfeeding, we’ll deliberately be using the word nursing because to us it means a connection that’s more than just the milk.

What’s Different in This Edition?

This edition is for you, the twenty-first-century mother. This new century has new attitudes, new expectations, new trends … and new babies built on a very, very old design. Today’s babies have the same reflexes, the same instincts, the same needs that babies had thousands of years ago. We’ll offer perspectives on how the age-old behaviors of babies affect breastfeeding today, what our babies need from us, and what we need from motherhood. And we’ll help you find ways to adjust when your life and biology don’t match.

The world you’re living in also has more varied family structures. So we use the word partner in this edition to mean the person who shares your home, your life, and the care of your baby, whether that’s a husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, or significant other. Or you may have parents, friends, family members, or roommates whose presence is important to you and your child.

You have access to an almost infinite amount of information about breastfeeding online, but there’s plenty of misinformation out there as well, and it can be hard to know what to trust. So the concepts in this book are backed by the best practices in modern lactation science and solid research, with websites mentioned throughout the book and references in the back in case you want to learn more. They’re also backed by decades and decades—maybe millennia—of “mother wisdom.” Breastfeeding has always been something that women learn from one another, not from experts, so you’ll read about other mothers’ experiences throughout. Because our support networks are so vital to breastfeeding successfully, we’ve added a whole chapter just on this topic.

There’s also a lot of information on birth in this edition, because while you can find plenty of books about either birth or breastfeeding, there is a vital connection between the two that isn’t usually discussed. This is even more important today, when most women have medical interventions (such as induced labor, epidurals, or C-sections) during labor and birth. These interventions can have unexpected effects on both babies and mothers who are trying to get their breastfeeding relationship under way. To help get things back on track, we’ve added a chapter just about latching to explain approaches that tap into your and your baby’s built-in reflexes and instincts. We’ve added a section of chronological chapters, with much more information about the practicalities of living with a breastfed baby at each stage of development, including the joys and journeys of breastfeeding a child beyond the first year.

We’ve delved deeper into ways to get enough sleep, start solids, and wean. If you’re going back to work, we’ve added an expanded chapter to help you continue breastfeeding successfully, minimize your and your baby’s stress, and reconnect with each other after your time apart. We’ve added more information about ongoing challenges like exclusive pumping, premies, multiples, milk supply issues, breastfeeding with a chronic illness, and babies with special needs. We’ve added a “Tech Support” chapter with to-the-point information on shorter-term problems such as engorgement, jaundice, breast infections, medications, and surgery. We have a chapter all about La Leche League—how we started and what we’re all about. Finally, we’ve added a Tear-Sheet Toolkit of pages that you might want to keep handy or share with others.

Because sharing our stories is the way we women connect to one another most deeply, you’ll find a story at the beginning of each chapter, written by a mother from the past or present, sharing her experience from across time and space. It’s remarkable how much wisdom there is in the stories of mothers from many years ago; although the world has changed, much about breastfeeding is timeless.

This Edition’s Authors

We are three La Leche League Leaders—accredited LLL counselors. We’ve breastfed our own babies (nine of them among the three of us) for a combined total of nearly thirty years (yes, they’ve all weaned!)—experiences that drew us to work with, write for, and speak about breastfeeding mothers and babies.

For each of us, breastfeeding was a transformational experience, central to the way we learned to parent our children. It wasn’t always perfect or easy—we’ve struggled through mastitis, plugged ducts, thrush, and sore nipples. We’ve had babies who came early and babies who came late, babies who wanted to nurse constantly and babies who refused the breast altogether. We’ve had too much milk and not enough milk. We’ve worked in the home and outside. And when breastfeeding didn’t work out, there was still a heart full of love and a parenting style that was as close to human biology as we could make it.

Diana’s interest in helping mothers grew out of low supply with her first baby and her desire to find solutions. Diane wandered into it when she realized she was beginning to give as much help as she got at LLL meetings. Teresa figured from the start that if her horses, cats, and dogs could give birth and feed their babies, she could, too, and she became a Leader to help others find their own paths. But there also have been hundreds of contributors to this book—new mothers, older mothers, and great-grandmothers whose experiences have helped countless mothers over time. This is their book, and …

This Is YOUR Book!

We hope that this edition of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding will help you settle comfortably into a breastfeeding style that fits you, your baby, and your corner of the world. We think that learning about other mothers and your own and your baby’s natural tendencies will make finding your own style easier and more satisfying. As you’ll hear at almost any La Leche League meeting anywhere in the world, take a look around, choose only what feels best for you and your family, and leave the rest behind. Whether you get ideas and information from our book, from research, or from talking to other mothers, you know yourself, your baby, and your family better than anyone else. Just as mothers always have.

We want to hear from you! Please visit the forums at llli.org and share your experiences. Tell other mothers how things are going for you and ask any questions that come up as you read this book. In every era, mothering skills have spread like the ripples of a pond, mother to mother to mother. Someone’s ripple touches your life, you learn, and you send out ripples of your own. It’s a method of sharing as old as humankind, and as soon as you share that first pregnancy hint with another woman, you’ve become one of the ripple-makers. So keep in touch! Your ideas and experiences might be just what the next mother needs to hear.