Public Space and Private Bodies

Abstract

The question of where, in different cultures, it is thought appropriate to breast-feed, and how this might be explained was an important part of my motivation for undertaking this work. Studies of breast-feeding in Britain frequently refer to the difficulties of breast-feeding in public (Bacon and Wylie, 1976; Jones and Belsey, 1977; Hally et al., 1981; Martin and White, 1988). In this chapter I explore the meanings of public and private in relation to infant feeding. This particularly concerns the question of how breast-feeding became a private’ activity in the industrialised world in the sense of being conducted ‘out of sight’. The need for modesty, identified as an important dimension of women’s experience in the previous chapter, is a product of the discourses of femininity which construct women as always ‘really’ part of the private world. But infant feeding is also private in another sense: it is undertaken in women’s own, that is their private, time. This too requires exploration.