Measuring Mamma's Milk: Fascism and the Medicalization of Maternity in Italy. (Reviews).

Measuring Mamma's Milk: Fascism and the Medicalization of Maternity in Italy. By Elizabeth Dixon Whitaker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 3.58pp. $49.50).

An American (or any non-Italian) scholar who spends some time in the home of an Italian mamma as she tends to a new baby will be struck by two seemingly compulsive behavior patterns. One is taking the bambino's temperature daily, maybe even morning and night, always at exactly the same hour, although nothing seems to be amiss. The other is weighing the baby before and after each poppata. And if the scholar stays for a day or two, she will notice mother and child adhering to a rigid schedule: at the breast with military precision when the clock strikes 6:00, 10:00, 14:00, 18:00 and 22:00, or perhaps one hour later, but always five feedings and therefore as many as ten scale-tippings daily, followed by a good night's sleep for both. Once the amount of milk hidden in each breast has been thoroughly established, some of these weigh-ins may be skipped, although one would still want to check at least every morning or evening at the same hour to see that everything is working properly.

Surely most visiting professors (along with some native scholars) know all about these practices, or as in my case assisted marginally in performing them for my own infant daughter, and yet only Whitaker stopped long enough to ask in a thorough way why the Italian mamma does what she does and then to publish her findings in a substantial scholarly monograph. The answers she provides shed light in fascinating ways on the penetration of science and politics into intimate, changing relations between mother and child, adding richly to the "hand that rocks the cradle" genre of recent socio-historical interest.

Determining how much the baby should gain during each poppata is a complicated matter that depends on sex, age, and prior weight but for this calculation the qualified midwife of the Fascist era, or the pediatrician today, provides a chart, usually including a range of tolerable variations. The mother needs a very accurate (and rather expensive) scale for this, since as little as five grams (less than one-fifth of an ounce) in excess can mean dangerous overfeeding, leading to obesity and ultimately to soft-headedness. Underfeeding, although less harmful if it happens only occasionally, also threatens good development of mind and body. Therefore, the weighing must be done scientifically, with the baby in identical clothing or else naked, and quickly, before soiling the diaper changes the elements of the equation. Indeed, rough approximation of intake by checking the quantity and quality of poop is the way poorer women have been struggling toward the same childrearing objectives for centuries.

With artificial feeding of sterilized animal's milk, which theoretically might have appealed to Fascism's futurist instinct, much of this fuss would have been unnecessary since the liquid might have been measured in a clear glass bottle or standardized can and then dispensed in a totally sanitary way. But according to the day's leading scientists, babies nourished from any source other than their mother's breasts ran great risks, including the likelihood that they would grow up to be homosexuals, an outcome that would have undermined the reproductive cycle completely. Although the Fascists, supported by the Catholic Church, restricted their efforts to the shaming of mothers who refused to breastfeed, legislation to criminalize such behavior would have followed rationally from their ideology. Children were the State's responsibility, indeed, at critical times belonged to the State, and regulating the women who provided for them served a legitimate, in modem legalese we might say a "compelling," national intere st. The same logic that supported compulsory military service, required youngsters to attend years of schooling, and regulated who might marry, certainly allowed for the requirement that mothers take proper care in raising their children. And if objective scientists had determined that the breast was best, anything else might constitute child endangerment, at least for women able to produce milk in sufficient quantity, which leads us back to the weigh-ins.

Women whose economic circumstances forced them to work outside the home or who were too destitute to afford all the paraphernalia needed to be perfect mothers, not to mention those who for one reason or another found themselves in circumstances not conducive to consulting medical experts at the first sign of trouble, were not the main targets of Fascist regime propaganda about the benefits of breastfeeding. Rather, it was the "new woman." How else could Italy's rapid decline in natality, virtually from the year of its coming together as a modem nation, be explained? Faced with the facts that marriage rates had not changed, Italian men were as virile as ever, and deaths were declining at all ages and for both sexes, social scientists concluded that fewer births had to be the consequence of deteriorating female fecundity. One culprit was the city, with its lack of sunshine, fresh air, and opportunities for exercise. Another was the factory, where women smoked, drank, gossiped, and learned tricks to prevent conc eption. And then there was excess education, resulting in cerebral women whose greater head strength had weakened them from the waist to the knees. Modem nervousness and hysteria had set in, fed by misplaced ambition and discontent with being Adam's helpmate. The concept of gracility had taken over, causing young women to seek after the slender figure of a tubercular, anemic, chlorositic waif. Noise, excitement, pleasure-seeking, and use of electrical gadgets in the kitchen decreased menstrual flows and caused wives to suffer sexual neurasthenia, thereby reducing their desire to take in sperm, with its proven capacity to balance female humors and energize the body.

Readers of Measuring Mamma's Milk, in addition to learning much about the above issues, will be rewarded with the fruits of Whitaker's demographic work in a village in Emilia Romagna, showing the specifics of how rates of infant mortality declined sharply, as the primary cause of youthful death shifted from contagion to congenital mishap. Also sure to be welcome is her solid account of how ONMI (National Bureau for the Protection of Maternity and Infancy) functioned during and after Fascism.

Finally, some may be disturbed, or perhaps only bemused, by the author's nostalgic invocation of the biologically pure pre-agricultural world still active in our genes, one in which our mothers breastfed us in accord with nature's true rhythms, as often as they and we felt the urge, toting us around the forest or jungle for miles each day while foraging for food for themselves, mostly wild plants and low-fat game, troubled by no dairy products or caloric bombs. But we can't really blame Mussolini and his cronies for that too, which does raise larger questions about what aspects of Whitaker's story belong particularly to Italy and what themes might be understood more fully in the wider context of western modernity. Are twenty-first century American breast-feeders less the manipulated creatures of science and politics than the women of Fascist Italy?