Breast Holes

I heard something on Radio 4 yesterday which fascinated me. I was on my way to a midwife appointment and filed it away in my head, thinking the midwife would find it as interesting as I did. But there's a hole in the back of my head and the story fell out, until I found it on my shoulders just now.

The presenter was being taken round an old mill, where she was shown a small arch-shaped hole in the wall. She was asked what she thought it might be. "A doorway for elves?" she asked, astutely. The role played by elves in the industrial revolution is of course well known.

But no, it was a breast hole. Because the women who worked in these mills would return to work within days of giving birth, leaving their babies to be minded by grandparents, or informal community creches. But the quality of non-breast-milk was very poor, not to mention the minimal sanitation available for cleaning bottles and the like, so the mortality of non-breast-fed babies was high. It made sense for the capitalists to safeguard the lives of the future working generation, as well as the productivity of mothers who were not bogged down by bereavement, and were benefiting from the mild contraceptive effects of breastfeeding.

So, they provided a hole. So that hungry babies could be brought to the factory gate, there to take advantage of the exposed mammaries of their poor hugless mothers.

Suddenly the torture of breast-milk-expressing contraptions, used in the toilets at work whilst baby is gurgling happily on some nursery floor, seems slightly more bearable.


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