Mothers’ milk and mothers’ time: childcare advice and the conceptualization of demand feeding in post-1945 Britain and Italy

This article draws on childcare advice to investigate the shift from breastfeeding by the clock to feeding on demand in twentieth-century Britain and Italy, to demonstrate that it was not just mothers’ bodies, nor what they fed their children, but their time that was subject to political, medical, and cultural attention. The comparative approach highlights the convergences and divergences in breastfeeding advice, illuminating the interactions with political and intellectual currents, as much as social and economic patterns. ‘Scientific motherhood’ and the promotion of feeding by the clock dominated in Britain and Italy at the beginning of the century, and persisted under fascist initiatives to regulate breastfeeding. Some existing differences, however, contained the seeds of greater divergence after 1945 in the two countries. Shaped by differing intersections of medical, psychoanalytic, and feminist thinking, the uneven shift to the concept of demand feeding slowly took root in Britain in the post-war period, but in Italy only in the context of 1968 counter-cultural ideas. The 1970s brought the conversation back to a point of convergence between Britain and Italy in the feminist recognition of the complexities of balancing the ‘rights and duties’ of mothers and children when it came to feeding babies.