Essays on Parenting

The Breastfeeding Café by Barbara Behrmann

The Breastfeeding Café: Mothers Share the Joys, Challenges and Secrets of Nursing

Barbara Behrmann

Rights: World
For more info, contact Michael Kehoe at mkehoe@umich.edu

In this collection of women's first-hand accounts of breastfeeding experiences, thoughts and feelings, editor Barbara Behrmann listened to new mothers, experienced pros, and women whose nursing days were far behind them. She spoke with women who bring to their mothering diverse life experiences: they were married and single, in the work force and out, white and blue collar, wealthy, poor, young and old. They had different ethnic and racial backgrounds, sexual orientations, and religious and philosophical beliefs. They give birth in hospitals, birth centers, and at home, and had both positive and negative birthing experiences. They had healthy children and sick children. Some women nursed for a few weeks; others for a few years. Some women wrote about their experiences but most were shared through the interviews.

The Breastfeeding Café emerged from these interviews, writings and research. At this virtual café, women discuss the joys and rewards, frustrations and challenges, sorrow and anger, pride and satisfaction, and humor and poignancy that characterizes nursing in the world today. The stories reveal the many ways in which we create a breastfeeding relationship with our children and show not only how nursing affects our mothering, but how it affects our identity as women, mothers, and lovers. Anthropologist Penny Van Esterick has said about breastfeeding, "...we learn that breastfeeding is about love, ecology, politics, power, women's knowledge and the wisdom of the body. It is about the personal messages and memories that contribute to who we are as people and the way we relate to others."

Barbara L. Behrmann has a Ph.D. in Rural Sociology from Penn State University. She has done extensive research in both international and U.S. issues in breastfeeding. For the past nine years she has been raising two children, conducting interviews with hundreds of women about their experiences breastfeeding, and writing this book.

Spring 2005
328 pages