150 NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
gradual social interaction in close confines over the course of a week had effects
similar to those of hormonal doping. Although Rosenblatt called this a “non-
hormonal” mechanism of behavior modification, Feldman’s studies of the plas-
ticity of oxytocin point to another interpretation. In both of these experiments,
adoption could have involved physiological transformations. Rosenblatt was
interested in the transformative effects of hormones on relational behavior, but
his experiment also pointed a way to thinking about the transformative effects of
relations on hormones and other physiological aspects of embodiment.
8 Schiebinger writes that in the eighteenth century, when Carolus Linnaeus classi-
fied mammals and named them for milk- producing mammae present in females,
breastfeeding was so unpopular that not only aristocrats but also artisans, mer-
chants, and farm families regularly sent their infants away to be nursed. Because
wet nurses had inferior nutrition and living conditions and were often feeding
multiple babies, the mortality rate was high. Even so, mothers were so reticent to
breastfeed, and officials so emphatic that they do, that breastfeeding was the sub-
ject of public health campaigns even in the eighteenth century. In Prussia a law
was enacted in 1794 to force them. In Jamaica the courts urged European women
to halt the practice of cross- racial wet- nursing on grounds of moral depravity.
In France anti – wet nursing campaigns extolled the virtues of mother’s milk and
chastised women for abandoning their natural roles. Leading Enlightenment
scholars demanded that mothers must follow their instincts and adhere to the
laws of nature. Linnaeus rejected women’s explanations for refusing to nurse. He
argued, as Schiebinger puts it, “women only pretended to be unable to breast-
feed and ridiculed their many ‘excuses’: that they did not have enough milk, or
could not be deprived of fluids precious to their own health, or were overloaded
with domestic affairs” (1993, 70). The moralistic claims of the Enlighteners linked
breastfeeding to attachment and maternal love, and these to the broader social
good. The division of labor between the sexes being negotiated in Europe in the
eighteenth century was not based on conserving given arrangements, but on
institutionalizing an idealized view of maternity. The maternalized brain model,
then, is not the first treatment of the maternal body as the source of all family
bonds, even while actual practices suggest otherwise.
9 Andrew and Harvery (2001) point out that breastfeeding rates in the United
States and United Kingdom were the highest recorded to date in 2001. In the
United States, however, while 69.5 percent of mothers initiated breastfeeding,
only 32.5 percent breastfed until six months. In the United Kingdom 78 percent
of mothers initiated breastfeeding in 2001. However, the rate of exclusive breast-
feeding until six months (as recommended by the World Health Organization)
was less than 1 percent.
10 In their study of 160 first- time fathers and mothers (80 couples), the researchers
claim to find comparable baseline concentrations of plasma oxytocin in fathers
and mothers, activity- dependent plasticity in both, and biological synchrony
between coparents as well as between parents and offspring (Feldman 2012).