It took me time to see Mary Cassatt. And then she saw me. The following is a bit of a love-letter:
Mary Cassatt is a familiar fixture if you’ve heard of Impressionism. She painted a lot of women and children, achieved a high degree of realism, mainly interiors. She was the lone female painter that was allowed to join the official group of Impressionists, but that didn’t really matter to me one way or the other. I just knew her color palette wasn’t as bold as Monet’s, her subjects weren’t as exciting or varied as Manet’s, neither were her stylistic experiments as dramatic as Cezanne’s. By picking traditional feminine subjects, in darkened rooms, looking demurely away, Cassatt seemed determined to conform to and even celebrate the confines of gender roles under the patriarchy. Maybe that’s what she needed to do to survive, but I couldn’t manage to get excited about it.
As I started painting more, I began to appreciate Cassatt’s technical mastery. Her artwork has this unbelievable way of wrangling squirming humanity into an ordered harmony without bludgeoning it into taxidermy-like submission. Even today, a Cassatt painting caputures living, breathing humanity much better than a Live Photo or a Boomerang or other contrivance of photographic technology. The drawing is accurate, but the brush strokes are loose and painterly, responding to the texture and illumination of the surface she describes. All of these contradictions she effortlessly balances on a knife’s edge. To me it’s hypnotic.
I still found her subject matter tired and unrelatable as I started working and my extended family aged and drifted. I continued to change, making things along the way. I lost a lot of the internalized sexism that I’d held on to as a girl who growing up in male-dominated spaces (punk rock, art collectives, computer engineering). I had a baby, and suddenly had to care for it. The rhythm of these rituals seeped into my life and sense of self. And through doing that work myself, in all its bloody, sweaty and tenacious glory, I started to wonder if Cassatt’s paintings weren’t really celebrating the Romanticism of Motherhood after all. In contrast to all the airbrushed photos that fill mommy-blogs, Cassatt’s work seemed to be the opposite of sensationalized. One hundred years later her work felt strikingly realistic. And I wondered if in fact her real goal was to celebrate mothers and caregivers as workers. To try to show the male-dominated art world the quiet heroism of female domestic labor.
Is it going to far to paint Cassatt as a feminist? No way. Experience trying to survive in male-dominated spaces would tell you she’d be just as likely to advocate for the advancement of other women as to be one of those annoying “I’ve-got-mine-now-you-get-yours” types who see other talented women as a threat, but she was definitely the former. Check out Cassatt’s (suspiciously destroyed/lost) mural for the Women’s Pavilion at the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition and you won’t doubt it. She even had tons of talented female contemporaries (I caught an exhibition called Women In Motion at PAFA that was dedicated to several of them). Cassatt never married or had children, perhaps believing (not irrationally) that the duties of wife and motherhood might preclude her ability to work as a painter, but she spent a lot of time with women who did take a more traditional path. Unable to work from the nude figure like male artists did,Cassatt made the non-traditional choice to focus on the vantage point she was allowed to access: that of domestic female spaces. Day after day, Cassatt saw women bathe, hold, cajole, and feed tiny humans, and elevated these mundane tasks to the level fine art. These depictions are not stuffy vanity portraits of rich families and their angelic children — they’re real, they do show the work.
And so, as a new mom, sweaty and exhausted and struggling to feed my newborn at 3am while my partner slept, I wondered if anyone saw me, maybe Cassatt did. Her work seemed to say that she saw us, the body-feeders as though we were as hard-working and heroic and dependable as Diego Rivera’s socialist motor workers in a Detroit factory. It felt nice.
Body-Feeding
What’s it been like learning to be a bodyfeeder?
Physical, emotional, and round-the clock. And completely different from the work done in my professional life, where I’m a web developer at an agency. At the agency, there are agreed-upon hours, contracts, coworkers, variety; the work is creative and intellectual. The work/life balance is good, and if it wasn’t I could work somewhere else, or negotiate. I’m good at it, and if I wasn’t, someone else could do the job instead. By contrast, body feeding has none of this translatable flexibility. Our biology seems to prefer a “one-baby, one feeder” relationship — lactation is an ability only unlocked by birth, and furthermore the amount of milk produced is carefully calibrated between the baby and feeder via supply and demand. Feeding work is essential. This might sound romantic and self-important but it also means that someone else has a claim on your body and its labor. Essential things must be done when they need to be done, leaving the worker vulnerable to overwork and burnout. “The worker” being me.
The feeding job began immediately, in that raw, postpartum haze. At first I was really bad at it, and found the schedule relentless. Newborns need to eat every 2 hours, and they drink slow. If a REM cycle is 3 hours, how do you like those sleep prospects? I knew almost nothing about nursing, but since all mammals did it, I assumed it was relatively easy. There wasn’t really family knowledge I could access. I knew from old letters that my mom had been pretty solidly in the pro-formula camp (despite oligopoly in the formula industry and the non-trivial cost, I think her generation saw it as a feminist coup, allowing other people to share in the feeding duties). My mom’ sister said something to the effect of “it’s too hard, you’ll never make it” when she heard I planned to body-feed (she was a physician in the 90s and early otts). I also found most internet literature pretty unhelpful. Either it was some obnoxiously twee Earth-Mama lifestyle content, or yet another SEO-optimized version of The Four Nursing Holds (cradle hold! cross-cradle! side-lying! football!) that simply glossed over the many other hard parts, such as latching, how to tell when the baby is hungry or has a lip-tie or wants to suckle for a sleep-aid or comfort. The first effective nursing position I stumbled on you might call the “fiddler crab”. It involved keeping my right forearm tightly flexed holding the baby’s entire body while I pinched my left nipple to make it as small and pointy as possible, to fit a newborn’s tiny mouth. This was only minorly effective and gave me back-aches. I spent many interim hours lying flat on the floor.
It took practice to even reach fiddler crab status. Over and over again I’d try to get my baby to latch, and instead of drinking, they would spit out the nipple, or choke and spit out the nipple, or worst lethargically drowse off without drinking anything at all. This was bad because if a baby doesn’t regularly latch and drink the pre-milk (called colostrum) your body won’t get any cues to start producing The Good Stuff in the next 3-5 days. Days passed and the baby steadily lost weight — 3%, 5%, 7.6%, then 9.5%. Loss of 10% of birth weight means doctors will start pressuring you to supplement with formula. And not to judge anyone who chooses to use formula, but I didn’t want that. This was the plan, and I felt if I failed, I’d be letting my baby, my partner, my midwife, to some degree my whole extended community, down.
Luckily, I had help. My midwife asked another mom in our community to donate a bit of her pumped milk, and gave us a syringe to administer it in order to “perk up” the baby if they started sleeping through meals. She also referred us to a lactation consultant who gave me some remedial “latching lessons”, and told me how to use a pump to get a milk supply going. She encouraged me as I struggled through that first tough week and within 7 days the baby was back up to birth weight! We were out of the woods. Soon I was spending a lot of (quality?) time with the baby, transferring milk. 8 to 12 times per day, 10 to 20 minutes at a time (not counting the minutes the baby takes a break and isn’t drinking). Sitting patiently, or impatiently. Dozing. Thinking.
Calories of Power
Does it change me? Sure. At first it makes me feel like a piece of furniture, like my friend’s automatic cat feeder. Food goes in, milk comes out, roughly 500 calories worth every day. It don’t have much say in the matter, if I want my spawn to grow up big and strong. This non-consent is unsettling, like I’m one of those bodies hooked up to tubes in The Matrix. As energy is siphoned out of my body, powerful waves of thirst or hunger remind me that although I am no longer pregnant, still my body is not my own.
I listen to a lot of podcasts while latch-trapped. On one of them I learn about Anglo-Saxon feasting culture. In premodern Britain, local men (men) would be invited to witness the lord’s power, in the form of bottomless food, and gorge themselves. By eating at the lord’s table they got a better meal than they were used to, and in doing so declared themselves grateful and therefor loyal to said lord. You can spin this factoid any way you want, but at the heart I think it’s interesting that care for the body in the form of food was these lords’ chosen vehicle for forming a basis for their power. Not any other base need; FOOD. Not violent taking; generous GIVING.
Still though, feeding someone is giving on another level. It isn’t like buying carbon offsets or giving to a rent relief fund, or being a sustaining member of NPR. As I see the look of pure worship that my baby wears when they see their favorite person (Left Boobie! though Right Boobie is a close second) I can’t help but think of my body as an extraction site, a landscape. The implications of this make me uneasy. In high school social studies, a teacher taught us that extractive economic activities basically always exist at a power disadvantage to all economic activities that occur downstream of them — even though they are only made possible by the extraction in the first place. I’m not a capitalist so I don’t really get why, but anyone can see it proven true if they compare the build cycle and profit distribution patterns for any product. Whether it’s an iPhone, a movie or a pair of jeans it’s always the same. Everyone knows the cotton farmer or miner of rare earths is getting ripped off. The creatives are given just enough to keep them selling their ideas, while the investors and executives who don’t make anything at all walk off with most of the profit. The landscape itself is thanklessly plundered.
Tired as I am, I really do feel lucky. Despite being more sustainable and cost-effective, in the United States rates of body-feeding are actually higher among wealthier, more educated Americans, and I appreciate the resources and support that helped get me here. Friends and family descend to help us adjust, cooking, cleaning, going up and down the stairs while I’m recovering. It feels poetic that, as I’m pouring myself out to feed the newborn, others are feeding me. When I’m at a breaking point I try to remind myself of this. I try not to sulk openly too often, while everyone basks in the new-baby glow. I feel like it’s the least I can do. When our overflowing fridge at last empties out I watch my partner drink Soylent as an afternoon pick-me-up. It strikes me Soylent is a kind of VC-backed (vegan) adult breastmilk, mass-produced for infantile adults who’d rather stare at a screen than participate in food culture. I don’t say it out loud because my partner is actually a good cook and these days I’m vocally arguing with him about almost everything else. One night he tries some of The Good Stuff straight from the source. He says it’s really sugary.
Symbiosis
The baby gained physical health quickly, but our relationship took a bit longer. Feeding was this intimate space that me and the baby now could access, but neither of us exactly felt safe in there. I felt open to attack, and the baby felt like I was withholding essential calories they needed to survive. I gave as much as I could, but not quite willingly. The baby received the nutrition, but not quite gratefully. At times it felt low-key traumatic, all forced limbs, tiny fingernails, red-faced baby-tears. It was not the foundation I wanted for me and my child. But there was a glimmer of hope. Rarely, usually in the dead of night, I’d respond to the baby’s hungry-cry and they’d open their eyes and magically be calm and patient. Slowly, I’d plop them on my chest. Squinty-eyed, they’d fumble, until they found the milk they were looking for, and drank til they were full. They didn’t howl or scratch, so I never had to grab their head and manually latch them (some people swear by this method, my baby hates it). I felt respected, so I let them take their time.
If the baby and I were to continue as body-feeding partners, this is how I wanted it to be. We were partners in a way. We didn’t have language, and I held most of the power, but I could listen and respond with my actions. To preserve my self-respect, I set up ground rules with the baby. I would feed willingly when they asked, but if they started having a tantrum there would be a time-out, and myself or someone else would gently calm them down. As cranky and sleep-deprived as I was, I started to realize the baby might be cranky and tired too, so we started helping them nap more. That was huge. It’s not always perfect, but mostly it works.
What I took away from this, the most ordinary of miracles, is that symbiosis is a choice. It’s basic, but it feels really applicable when I think about the ways other relationships in my life have failed or succeeded, be they activist coalitions, working partnerships, relationships with neighbors. The kinds of relationships we rely upon to survive. The thing about our species is there is no “default setting”. Reproduce, or not. Caretake, or not. Body-feed, or feed another way (fed is best). Dominate, or coexist. We choose the work we want to do in the world, and that in turn makes the world we give future generations to work in.
Smallness
Since the baby, my world has become suddenly very small, but also deep. Small moments have meaning. My baby won’t remember the relationship we had when it revolved around body-feeding them, and maybe I won’t either. But maybe we’ll remember how it felt.
I want them to remember the feeling that the world is abundant, but not infinite. To know what it feels like to be sated, so they don’t resort to gluttony or greed. To know what it feels like to be cared for so they’ll know how to care for themself and others. I also want them to be scrappy and to tread on the Earth lightly. It feels somewhat reckless to be bringing a new human into the world when I know they’ll have to grapple with a climate crisis, but it would feel awfully pessimistic not to, and so it’s important to me that the way in which we’re doing it be a vote for the kind of world I want my kid to be born into. As a techno-minimalist (tech is cool, products are fine, but if you don’t need to buy it let’s give the Earth a break) things like not owning a car, body-feeding, using cloth diapers are part of that. Not that any of it is enough.
For all this I’m happy to do the work. The kind you do every day because it needs to be done, not because it’s celebrated, because you’re who’s there and you know it matters. I’m even proud to. And maybe Mary Cassatt is proud of us too. I hope she had enough people being proud of her in her time.
