Das Stillverhalten von Akademikerinnen in der Zeit von 1950 bis 1990 (Volume 6) (English shop)

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Breast milk is considered the ideal nutrition for infants, since breastfeeding is said to offer numerous health benefits for mother and child while also fostering successful mother-child bonding. UNICEF and the World Health Organization therefore advocate exclusive breastfeeding during the first six months of life. Actual breastfeeding behaviour, however, falls far short of these recommendations: according to the results of a representative survey on children’s and adolescents’ health, the six-month breastfeeding rate in Germany between 1986 and 2005 was only 22.4%.

At the Institute for the History of Medicine in Düsseldorf, an oral history project is for the first time documenting the long-term development of breastfeeding behaviour in the period from 1950 to 1990. On the basis of retrospective cohort studies with several hundred participants, breastfeeding behaviour, its changes and possible influencing factors are examined, and a prognostic assessment of measures to promote breastfeeding is undertaken. The inclusion of different periods helps to quantify the effects of scientific, political and social changes.

Within this framework, Antonia Charlotte Freiin Teuffel von Birkensee analyses in her dissertation the duration of breastfeeding, the reasons for weaning and the factors influencing mothers’ feeding decisions. Her findings are based on interviews with 100 mothers with an academic career who had their children between 1950 and 1990 and lived in the Federal Republic of Germany. It becomes apparent that the choice of infant nutrition, then as now, is shaped by multiple sociocultural circumstances and thus extends far beyond nutritional aspects.