Maternal Breast-Feeding and Its Substitutes in Nineteenth-Century French Art

In Maternal Breast-Feeding and Its Substitutes in Nineteenth-Century French Art, Gal Ventura investigates the ideological concepts behind the endorsement of maternal breast-feeding in modern Western society. Using diverse visual and textual sources and surveying hundreds of artworks produced from the time of the French Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century, Ventura reveals the historical, political, religious, and economic factors that shaped the representations of breast-feeding and its substitutes in French art. She thus sheds lights on the changing attitudes toward maternal breast-feeding in nineteenth-century France, which have had a considerable impact on the glorification of breast-feeding in the Western world to this very day.