Archive for July, 2009

Chalk up one more for traditional media. We’ve been plugging Harmony and Dissent by Bruce Elder since its release a better part of a year ago. It’s a great book and most recently, you may recall, won the Robert Motherwell Book Award from the Dedalus Foundation.  Sales have been respectable, but it’s an expensive hardcover academic book, and in these times of fiscal restraint that format is a harder sell.

So you can imagine my curiosity when I noticed a jump in sales of this title just a few days ago. I wondered if news of the award was just filtering through. This morning in my mail, however, was a clipping of the review in CHOICE Magazine, a publication of the American Library Association, used by many librarians for collection development. I can’t reproduce the whole review, because it is under copyright, but here’s a sampling of what the reviewer says:

With a distinguished career as a filmmaker and critic, Elder (Ryerson Univ.) comes qualified to discuss this subject. In this rich, complex book, he sets out to explore both the “absolute film tradition” as it developed principally in Germany and France (particularly in the work of Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, and Viking Eggeling) and the development of constructivism in the Russian tradition (especially in the work of Sergei Eisenstein).

…

Elder’s masterful book is a must for everyone interested in cinematic modernism, particularly the early-20th-century European avant-gardes. Summary: Essential

What this means to me is that we need to continue to find ways for various platforms of media to survive. Regardless of premonitions of doom for print media, it’s obvious that, at least at this point, there are still people, or perhaps sectors, who are using it. In the case of CHOICE, the review would have been printed in a magazine, and also made available online to subscribers only. What would make this website even more valuable would be a free section so that archived reviews would be accessible without a subscription.

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Thanks to Unclassified Thoughts and Written Words for the kind words about The One Best Way? Breastfeeding History, Politics, and Policy in Canada.

This book is both fascinating and timely. For all our recommendations and guidelines, our “progressive” attitudes, and the right to breastfeed in public, the breastfeeding debates still reign.

I started monitoring breastfeeding in online news last week when I was blogging about it and the alerts just keep on coming, day after day, story after story about not just breastfeeding but parenting, specifically mothering, choices. Just the other day The Globe and Mail ran a story called “Mommy Wants a Drinky-Poo” about the proliferation of clubs, books, Facebook groups, etc., centring around the idea that moms need to have fun too.  And that fun includes martinis. In the article, WLU Press author Veronica Strong-Boag comments,

It’s a very dated way of reacquiring one’s youth or liberation,” Ms. Strong-Boag says. If a mother truly wants to be radical, she adds, “get your guy to do 50 per cent of the housework.

And how about this line, from the first post of a young mother and columnist for Tracy Press:  “Being supermom is attainable — no matter how old you are.”  Her second post is called “The Downfall of Breastfeeding” and laments,

It was pounded into my head from day one that breast milk was the only way to go. I became so fearful of formula feeding that I completely banished the thought from my mind. I wasn’t about to hurt my baby by not giving him breast milk. As life often shows, plans can always change.

…

What I really should have been told is that a healthy baby who gains weight is the optimum goal. How you get there is up to you and your baby.

Can I just ask that we banish the term “supermom?” It’s not at all helpful. It’s never really said with genuine admiration—much more often it’s a dig about the choices individuals make from someone feeling defensive about their own. And having that as a goal pretty much sets you up for disappointment.

And in the we need a law for that? category comes the news that in South Australia, a woman cannot any longer be denied service or goods while breastfeeding.

Finally, in an update from the story that started this week’s discussion, a North Dakota woman who was arrested for breastfeeding her baby while intoxicated has pleaded guilty to child neglect and faces up to five years in jail. See the video on this news site for opposing views on the fairness of this sentence and some further context for the arrest itself.

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	Yesterday I blogged about breastfeeding stories in the news, including one about a woman who was arrested for breastfeeding while drunk. I asked Tasnim Nathoo, co-author of The One Best Way? Breastfeeding History, Politics, and Policy in Canada, to comment on the story. Here is what she said:
		It’s been interesting to observe the amount of media attention the issue of breastfeeding while drunk has received recently. It’s not really about whether mothers should drink alcohol while breastfeeding (the amount of alcohol in breast milk mirrors your blood alcohol level – we should be much more concerned about a mother dropping the baby than harming the baby by alcohol poisoning). Perhaps it’s challenging for us all to read about a woman who is simultaneously a “good mother” (she is breastfeeding, after all, currently the “best way” to feed your baby) and a “bad mother” (being drunk and possibly neglectful). I think I’d like to hear more about what’s going on in the life of Stacey Anvarinia and the other women who have recently shared the spotlight on this issue. Perhaps their life circumstances are such that we should be applauding them for attempting to breastfeed at all.
Interested in the outrage that occurred around this story, and increasingly tired of “bad mother” stories in the news, I created a Google Alert for news stories on breastfeeding. This morning’s feed produced one or two information-type stories on breastfeeding health and many more stories about the “taboos” surrounding breastfeeding, which included the story about the arrest and others about difficulties feeding in public or products developed to camouflage the act of breastfeeding. As someone who grew up accepting breastfeeding as a natural part of life I’m always mystified by the furor of the commentary any time it makes the news. It’s as if there is nothing as dangerous as accidentally viewing a woman’s breast.

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This week’s release of The One Best Way? Breastfeeding History, Politics, and Policy in Canada, by Tasnim Nathoo and Aleck Ostry, is timely, as breastfeeding is back in the news again.

In Bismarck, ND, a woman was arrested and charged with child neglect for breastfeeding her daughter while drunk. And the Daily Mail reports that letters poured in by the hundreds when the magazine Mother and Baby asked, Is Britain breastfeeding friendly? The answer was apparently a resounding, “no!”, with 60% of women reporting that it is a stressful experience to breastfeed in public; more than half of them had been asked to leave while breastfeeding  in a public place.

The One Best Way traces the history of breastfeeding policy and practice from the late nineteenth century to the present.  Whereas women were once urged to breastfeed as a patriotic duty, more recently it has become a moral issue, with women who choose to bottle feed their infant feeling branded as a “bad mother.” In between there was the elevation of paediatricians and scientific ideas and the promotion of formula use as the healthier option. Nathoo and Ostry track all these trends and ideologies in this very interesting book.

Their conclusion? It behooves us all to “view individual breastfeeding decisions with respect and compassion.”

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