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Breasts & The Beestings: Rethinking Breast-Feeding Practices, Maternity Rituals, & Maternal Attachment In Britain & Ireland, Susan Hogan

Journal of International Women's Studies

Viewing the wider collective rituals of childbirth as liminal is helpful in understanding the highly contested nature of many cultural practices. With English & Irish historical examples, this essay will argue that it has been to the advantage of women that they maintain a wide range of post-partum taboos and rituals. The themes of postpartum pollution and female power are developed in the context of wet-nursing and the withholding of colostrum. ‘Churching’, evident in the medieval period in Britain, continues to this very day, though in a simplified form. The colostrum taboo and ideas about the transmission of personality via …