Expressing Anxiety? Breast pump usage in American wage workplaces

Abstract

This article considers the potential and problems for women seeking to combine breastfeeding with wage labor outside the home through the use of breast pumps. After locating the breast pump within cultural, historical and legislative contexts of shifting views about infant nutrition on the one hand and trends in women's participation in the wage work force on the other, we unpack how this technology has re-shaped the landscape of choices about infant feeding in the United States. Using disciplinary lenses of science and technology studies, feminist geography and women's studies, we examine how the breast pump has reshaped workplace experiences after childbirth. Based on interviews and survey data with respondents in Albany, New York across a range of class and racial backgrounds, we submit that while the breast pump does allow some women to combine breastfeeding and wage work outside the home, the advantages of breast pumps are constrained both by cultural attitudes about pumping as an activity, the lack of a sufficient legislative framework, as well as by the way workplaces themselves are designed.

Work–Life Balance and Parenthood: A Comparative Review of Definitions, Equity and Enrichment*

“…For example, Collins (2007) underlines how low‐paid and low‐skilled workers (especially if they are women) may be employed by ‘career couples’ to perform domestic or childcare work and may themselves experience poor work–life balance, but without the benefits of a good income. Ethnic minority women such as those in Ehrenreich and Hochschild's (2003) and Boswell‐Penc and Boyer's (2007) study may be separated from their own children while caring for the infants of more affluent families. These and other less privileged groups receive limited attention within organizational psychology literature (Özbilgin et al .…”

Timing of Return to Work and Breastfeeding in Australia

“…Given the time-consuming nature of breastfeeding and the documented difficulties of expressing milk in workplaces, 28,29 an important factor that should be taken into consideration is the lactation support in workplaces and access to working arrangements that facilitate breastfeeding for those mothers who returned to work. In workplaces that provide facilities to help mothers continue breastfeeding (eg, employer allows working from home, or provides on-site child care), working hours might be less important than otherwise.…”

‘Milk Pride’: Lactivist Online Constructions of Positive Breastfeeding Value

“…It could be argued that such photographs also serve to fetishise breastmilk -a substance so precious that the work of extracting it becomes rewarding. During the day, when a woman posts an image of recently expressed milk, it might be a sign of working a double shift -as a wage worker and a mother -and the picture of ' output' created during work hours attests to her 'productivity' in both (Boyer 2014;Boswell-Penc and Boyer 2007). Pumping at work rarely problematises this narrative of productivity, rather suggesting a seamless integration of women's reproductive capacities with waged work.…”