Do we discriminate against women who don’t breastfeed?

In an article in this month’s Atlantic, contributing editor Hannah Rosin discussed a dilemma she faced when hanging out with other moms: “In my playground set, the urban moms in their tight jeans and oversize sunglasses size each other up using a whole range of signifiers: organic content of snacks, sleekness of stroller, ratio of tasteful wooden toys to plastic,” she wrote. “But breastfeeding is the real ticket into the club.”

 Her essay, “The Case Against Breast-Feeding,” is actually quite funny. She discusses how our culture makes women feel guilty if they can’t or choose not to breastfeed. Or if perhaps, they choose not to keep doing it for the full year as recommended by the American Academy of Pediaticians.

In Betty Friedan’s day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around—a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the “happy housewife heroine,” as Friedan sardonically called her.When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Book—a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up—the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound.

Still, despite my stint as the postpartum playground crank, I could not bring myself to stop breast-feeding—too many years of Sears’s conditioning, too many playground spies. So I was left feeling trapped, like many women before me, in the middle-class mother’s prison of vague discontent: surly but too privileged for pity, breast-feeding with one hand while answering the cell phone with the other, and barking at my older kids to get their own organic, 100 percent juice—the modern, multitasking mother’s version of Friedan’s “problem that has no name.”

I was probably a militant breastfeeder for a while. Every infant has a right to breastmilk, I used to think. Although I didn’t say it out loud, I believed that it was the obligation of all mothers to make the effort to nurse. But a few months ago, when my daughter was well over 2 and still nursing, I was beginning to grow weary. After all, my body had been “in use” – two pregnancies, births and non-stop breastfeeding  – for nearly six years. So a part of me really related to this article despite its title.

What do you think about Rosin’s essay? (It’s kind of long, I know, but worth the read.) Do you think we tend to discriminate against mothers who can’t or choose not to breastfeed?