Belly,

"Just maybe, the pool people had concerns about young kids looking on."

I'll tell you what, Belly, if the young kids had looked on, they wouldn't have blinked an eyelid.

It takes years of conditioning to react in a Puritan manner to something so basic as nurturing an infant by breast.

Sheeeeesh!!

<It takes years of conditioning to react in a Puritan manner to something so basic as nurturing an infant by breast>

You imply that it is older people "years of conditioning" and most likely religious "puritanical" who have a hang-up.

But it isn't that way at all is it? Because previous research showed that those aged 18 to 24 were the least supportive of public breastfeeding. Yet they are the children of your generation of feminists and went through a feminised education system. What went wrong?

I happen to support public breastfeeding. But women can do what they like. Too much information and who cares? It really doesn't matter what men think at all. The real opponents are women. Some are reliably likely to be opposed to anything they can construe as 'emphasis' on breastfeeding, which can be something as innocuous as publication of World Health Org encouragement of it.

Breastfeeding is another of those subjects that divide Western women and provoke angry arguments. The merest mention that mention that breastfeeding is an option is greeted with cries of outrage from many women. Why so? In much of the world women just get on with it without the fuss.

Rather than beard that stooge Koch, why don't women and especially feminists come clean on their own ambivalence and very mixed messages directed at one another?

onthebeach,

My reference to it taking years of Puritan indoctrination was meant to convey that this attitude is learned...it wasn't directed at any particular age group above the formative years.

If women or men want to argue about the merits or not of breastfeeding per se, that's up to them.

My point was and is that nursing mothers have every right to feed their children in public - that they are already discreet - and they don't require a prod of patronising language to let them know that breastfeeding in public is "tolerated" as long as........

It wasn't Puritan indoctrination. Women swung against breastfeeding when formula became the vogue. Formula was an obvious conspicuous consumption item that set middle class women above their less well off counterparts who couldn't afford it. Some women like a bit of snob value.

Feminism was responsible for the next wave against breastfeeding. There are some obvious parallels. But the real driver against had to do with feminists devaluing motherhood and family, behind career and materialism.

A double-decker busload of radical feminists wouldn't make a similar contribution to the economy and society as one breastfeeding mother. Worse, they acted to hinder her.

Sometimes women can be their own worst enemies.

Sorry Poirot, best I leave,no room exists for men to think even a little differently.
The modern sister hood is right, always men wrong always.
No woman , praise them! ever breast fed in a wrong way/place

Onthebeach,

You won't get any argument from me about the rise of formulas feeding in modern consumer society.

Somehow, though, the minute I put up my hand and defend a woman's right to nourish her baby by breast outside the confines of select areas, I'm painted a "feminist".

I wonder why contemporary women give up on the notion of breastfeeding? That woman at the pool charged with supervising two young children and meeting the needs of a hungry baby simultaneously, would have had no problem feeding bub if she'd shoved a bottle in its mouth. She wouldn't have been requested to dump a blanket over the kid on a hot day at the pool - or have felt like she had to go and hide the act in the toilet block.

Of the many mums I've known who start out breastfeeding, most only do it for a few months, often for the sheer convenience bottle-feeding provides in a world where they find themselves most days outside the house and in the public sphere.

Belly - every time you disagree with me, do I throw my hands in the air and say "Oh, apparently I'm not allowed to have an opinion?".

Why do you do it?

I am not a member of any bloody "sisterhood". I'm my own women who happens to believe that breastfeeding an infant in most paces is a reasonable act.

And so what if a woman ever fed her baby in the wrong way (how does that go?) or in the wrong place (perhaps not at a funeral:)...it doesn't follow that most women are not discreet and mindful when breastfeeding.