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Pregnant
women and nursing mothers.
The Breastfeeding Café is a
community of nursing mothers and a place for women to go to for support,
validation, and inspiration. It also helps women identify, avoid, and
overcome many of the obstacles women face in developing and maintaining a
successful nursing relationship in a bottle-feeding culture.
Health care
professionals and people who works with pregnant women and new mothers.
So often
women only seek help in the early days of nursing. This prevents their
helpers from seeing the long term impact of the time they spent together. A
month, a year, even ten years later, what they did – or didn’t do - during
those first days or weeks with that new mother often continues to have a
huge impact. Reading the stories in The Breastfeeding Café can help
health care professionals become more compassionate and sensitive.
Women need good breastfeeding
information, support, and understanding.
Breastfeeding a baby is not always easy.
Advice and information are crucial, but sometimes women just need support,
understanding and a window into the day-to-day reality of nursing and
nurturing our children. This holds true for mothers with nurslings of all
ages and stages.
Breastfeeding matters to
women. What
many women consider to be one of the most significant experiences of our
lives, remains devalued and largely invisible.
Many women nurse in a bottle-feeding culture.
An individual woman’s breastfeeding
experience is influenced by many factors. In the U.S. and other similar
countries, one of the most encompassing factors is that nursing takes place
within a bottle-feeding culture. This not only affects women’s experiences
of breastfeeding, but it influences how women think about and interpret
their experiences.
What Kinds of Issues Does the Book Address?
In
exploring what it means to nurse in our fast-paced, consumer-oriented culture,
The Breastfeeding Cafe addresses issues such as:
●How
does a woman’s birth experience affect her ability to breastfeed? How do
hospital-based procedures and policies undermine breastfeeding? How do women
deal with a baby who wants to nurse constantly or who is too sleepy to nurse?
How do women feed babies born prematurely or with medical complications?
●What
are the struggles women experience as nursing mothers in the work force? When
they have to be hospitalized? When they have twins or triplets to feed?
●How
do women manage the mixed messages they receive about their breasts? How does
nursing affect women’s sexuality and intimacy? How do cultural standards about
beauty affect the ability to produce milk?
●Why
do so many women describe breastfeeding as empowering, even healing? Why do
some women continue to nurse preschool aged children?
What Makes The
Breastfeeding Café Unique?
I know of no other
breastfeeding book that offers stories from such a diverse group of women.
The stories alone are honest and compelling, but equally important is the
analysis and information surrounding them.
As summarized in the Journal of Human
Lactation, the book is a “tapestry of women’s voices interwoven with
well-researched background and thoughtful commentary.”
I view the stories as the heart and soul of the book, but the material is
also tightly organized, referenced and indexed. Overall, the book is really
part support group, part cultural
critique.
Where do the Stories Come From?
The women whose stories appear
in this book all live in the United States, yet they represent all walks of
life: they are married and single, in the work force and out, white and blue
collar, wealthy and poor, young and old. They have different ethnic and
racial backgrounds, sexual orientations, and religious and philosophical
beliefs. They gave birth in hospitals, birth centers, and at home, and had
both positive and negative birthing experiences. Some women nursed for a few
weeks; others for a few years. They had wonderful experiences and
painful/disappointing ones. They have healthy children and sick children.
Together they portray both the unique and universal dimensions of
breastfeeding in a modern, contemporary, bottle-feeding culture.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: A Legacy from the Past: Stories of Disempowerment and
Determination
Chapter 2: Welcome to Motherhood: Stories of Initiation, Tenacity and
Adjustment
Chapter 3: No Mother is an Island: Stories of Family, Community and Support
Chapter 4: Becoming Wiser: Stories of Experience, Insight and Discovery
Chapter 5: A Balancing Act: Stories of Readjustment, Identity and Boundaries
Chapter 6: Doing it All: Stories of Motherhood and Livelihood
Chapter 7: An Embodied Relationship: Stories of Contradiction, Sexuality and
Intimacy
Chapter 8: Finding Strength: Stories of Reclamation, Empowerment and Healing
Chapter 9: Moving on and Letting Go: Stories of Weaning and Milestones
Conclusion
Appendix: Breastfeeding Resources
Chapter Summaries
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©2006 Barbara L. Behrmann. All Rights Reserved.
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