Celebrity Breasts: Not Just for Ogling Says Rutgers–Camden Scholar

CAMDEN - Last week, Salma Hayek shocked the world by feeding a baby. The shock: the baby isn’t hers and the food isn’t from a store.

According to a Rutgers University—Camden scholar, Hayek did something of value for the baby she breastfed during a Goodwill visit to Sierra Leone. But Hayek isn’t the only celebrity mom touting breastfeeding. Naomi Watts credits her rapid post-baby weight loss to nursing and Angelina Jolie breastfed one of her twins for the cover of W. 

Janet Golden, the author of the book The Social History of Wet Nursing: From Breast to Bottle, says celebrities might be more revered for their breasts as sexual objects, but they’re as mammalian as the rest of us. 

“Mammary glands are a shocking idea to some people, but they are the reason that human beings are called mammals. People forget that,” says Golden, a professor of history at Rutgers–Camden.

As mammals, human beings have fed their offspring by breast for hundreds of thousands of years. Wet nursing – when a woman nurses a baby not her own – had been practiced throughout the ages from Muhammad to Pavarotti, but decreased in popularity in the late 19th century when physicians began promoting scientific infant feeding using newly marketed formulas.

Breastfeeding, however, continues to be validated by all major health organizations as the choice way to feed infants, primarily for its unmatched immunological effects. Yet, only 12% of mothers continue to breastfeed exclusively after six months. Golden credits a society that’s big on boob jobs, but scant on support to breastfeeding moms.

“We do not have a society that supports breastfeeding. There is a generation of mothers and grandmothers who didn’t breastfeed, so there really isn’t a support system in place,” says Golden, who notes breastfeeding’s numerous positive effects for moms, like decreased risks of breast cancer and osteoporosis.

Golden recently contributed to an article in March’s O The Oprah Magazine about a demand for breast milk banks to save the thousands of low birth babies who die each year. Will society rise to the challenge?

 “The more research continues to show the benefits of breastfeeding, there will be a cultural switch - the same way that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a switch to formula.”

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