“Few other age groups have undergone greater demographic change during the twentieth century than infants,” states Verena Limper in this outstanding monograph (10). Yet, she asserts, in this troubling “age of extremes,” a century of mass violence and death, the experiences of children and especially of infants are hardly represented, not even in the various works on the history of childhood. Limper took this research deficit as a solicitation to dedicate her decade-long doctoral research to the scrupulous study of one core aspect of children's upbringing: the feeding of infants. As the German term “Säugling” (the infant that is nursed) captures well, the study uses the discourse about and the practices related to infant nursing to shed light on the exceptional significance of feeding in this specific time span in a child's life. A study of infant feeding is exceptionally meaningful, as it displays the very visions of the respective states for the future of their youngest generations and their changing approach to using infant food to implement those visions. While infants had no voice in formulating their nutritional needs, states aligned their welfare politics with their understanding thereof. It was “the welfare of the child [which] took precedence over the welfare of the mother” (365).
As the survival of the infant depended on its proper and continuous feeding, nursing was, as Limper convincingly demonstrates, never a private matter. Instead, nursing was always an “object of social and cultural standardization processes” (10) and a central concern of the respective social welfare systems. The author does an impressive job in exploring the ways in which the infant diet changed throughout the twentieth century, surveying the transformation of artificial infant feeding from being seen as a risky matter to a secure alternative to breastfeeding. Extending Ellen Key's notion of a “century of the child” to the “century of the bottle-fed infant” (Flaschenkind), the author approaches the bottle-fed infant as a prism and an analytical notion to shed light on the joint action and interaction of state actors as well as industrial and medical-scientific actors on behalf of the youngest children. Contrasting infant feeding in Sweden and Germany, though unfortunately excluding East Germany, this well-structured monograph approaches in three major chapters the discourses and practices of infant feeding: chapter 1 is dedicated to the production and materialisation of knowledge on infant feeding, chapter 2 explores the transfer and dissemination of knowledge, whereas chapter 3 investigates the application and acquisition of knowledge.
Pursuing predominantly an approach rooted in the history of knowledge, combined with an actor-network-theory-driven analysis, this excellent historical study engages with the century-long discursive battle over the question of what the right way to feed an infant was. Employing the term “Flaschenkind,” the bottle-fed infant, serves the author as an analytical tool to engage with and uncover the complex relations between infant nutrition, notions of the infant and its body, and the various historical actors involved in the infant's proper feeding. Carefully studying the origination, production, and consumption of bottle feeding, Verena Limper contrasts it with the morally charged notion of breastfeeding as the natural and best way to feed an infant and as the embodiment of being a “good mother.” How an infant would be fed was, however, not always a direct implementation of the knowledge available in a certain time. In the early twentieth century, Limper shows, how an infant was fed mostly depended on class belonging, access to knowledge, and financial resources. This, however, changed in the second half of the twentieth century when infant feeding became more and more standardized.
To prevent a dry and descriptive approach to the topic, the author identifies five major shifts when public perception and treatment of the infant body and its nutrition fundamentally changed. Subsuming the first stage under the title “The Fragmented Infant Body, ca. 1850-1906,” Limper observes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the infant body came to be seen as fundamentally different from the adult body, which required the creation of standards and norms of its customized feeding and care, which was mostly done by pediatricians. Limper describes the next stage of the perception of the infant body as “The Psychosomatic Infant Body, 1906-1930” and identifies a process of standardization of infant feeding. This regulatory approach to infant feeding was a response to the new notion of the body as a complex mechanism whose nutrition should happen at regular intervals so that the infant's psychological wellbeing could be secured. This process was followed by a new understanding of “The Holistic Infant Body, ca. 1930-1950.” The infant body was understood as a reflection of the nation's body. So, to create a healthy nation with healthy “human material” (438), the physical and mental wellbeing of the infant had to be reached through ideal nutrition. In response to such eugenic approaches to the infant body, the notion of “The Feeling Infant Body, ca. 1950 till the mid-1960s” shifted the focus to the infant's emotional wellbeing. Feeding was supposed to be handled more flexibly and individually, so that parents could respond better to the child's emotions. The last shift happened when “The Self-Regulatory Infant Body, mid-1960s till the mid-1980s” came to be seen as the most competent actor in determining and expressing its own nutritional needs. New psychological knowledge laid the foundation for this understanding of the infant as a “drinking, feeling, acting subject” (440) who instinctively possessed the ability to regulate its own feeding and thus its own body. The adult fear of pampering an infant due to excessive and too-frequent feeding was a long-maintained mantra, which only began to fade away in the late twentieth century.
Beyond identifying the various shifts in the public perception of infants, the author succeeds in rendering visible how infant feeding was embedded in power hierarchies and how it shaped and altered family relations. The ongoing discussion and struggle over the proper amount and ideal timing to feed an infant uncovers how much infant nutrition came to capture the underlying power dynamics between the hungry infant, its parents, nutrition experts, and the state. Limper's exploration of the discourse over and the practices of infant feeding also reflect the competition among various types of knowledge, such as experience knowledge (Erfahrungswissen), traditional knowledge, and expert knowledge, when it came to the application of this knowledge in actual families. The author takes into account a large body of expert literature to uncover the process of the medicalization of infant feeding and infant care in the first half of the twentieth century, when scientific knowledge was produced and transferred to parents, caretakers, and institutions created for this purpose. Exploring not just the circulating knowledge about proper feeding, Limper also thrives in tracing the origination of the material things that were necessary for infant feeding. She carefully unveils the scientific and institutional foundations that were necessary for the industrial manufacture of the feeding bottle and formula. The book closes with an analysis of the ways in which knowledge and material objects were practically used within the family. It is one of the great strengths of the book that the author seeks to trace the ways and means through which the changing theoretical and practical knowledge of ideal infant nutrition reached its final destination: the private homes of real families.
This study of infant nutrition is an inspiring example of how a history of childhood can make a major contribution to the general field of modern history. By daring to write this history of infant feeding as a combined history of knowledge and its transfer, of its material “things” and their use, and of the involved historical actors and their daily feeding practices, Verena Limper offers a very innovative approach to the history of the bottle-fed child.
