"The Highest Pleasure of Which Woman's Nature Is Capable": Breast-Feeding and the Sentimental Maternal Ideal in America, 1750-1860

A study combines close analyses of published representations of breast-feeding with the personal writings of mothers to show how the rhetoric of breast-feeding illuminated the development of the sentimental maternal ideal in America. These writings taught women to conform to a particular ideal that would grant them influence in the domestic sphere even as it circumscribed them within a narrow vision of ideal womanhood.