It’s eight in the morning, Mother’s Day, and Marian Tompson finally has a chance to talk. The last few weeks have been tough for her, a widow shuffling between her Evanston apartment, the toy store she manages, and her ill mother’s home in Franklin Park.
In 1956 Marian Tompson was on child number four. Nursing the first three kids hadn’t gone well. She knew nothing about the supply and demand of the breast-feeding process, nothing about taking care of sore nipples. Her doctor told her that mothers with small kids around the house were apt to lose their milk for the new infant, and encouraged her to keep plenty of formula and sterilizing equipment on hand. Still, Tompson wanted to nurse.
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Two years later, after several magazines and newspapers had written about these earth mothers, hundreds of groups had sprung up in living rooms around the country and the world. In order to respond to the torrential mail, Tompson, White, and five other mothers, who had 33 children between them, wrote one of the major best-sellers of all time, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. It has sold 3 million copies, in 43 countries and 27 languages.
The La Leche philosophy centers on how often and how well mothers and babies relate. The more milk the baby sucks, the more milk is produced. The mother’s separation from the baby (read: mom going to work) leads to a reduction in the milk supply, which leads to more separation.
“There is, of course, the subtle assumption in everything they do and say that at some point a woman will want to use a bottle. But that’s definitely not true.”
