Baby Food: Scientific Motherhood, Bottle-Feeding, and Formula

The adoption of these formulas was reinforced by the growth of the belief in so-called scientific motherhood, which emphasized the importance of medical and scientific expertise in all areas of mothering and favored bottle-feeding over breast-feeding. Mothers were to follow the advice of experts and adhere to rigid feeding schedules. Maternal instinct was considered old-fashioned and unsound; doctors were to “prescribe” breast-feeding or bottle-feeding to mothers.

Advice manuals, such as Frederic Bartlett’s Infants and Children: Their Feeding and Growth in 1932 and Benjamin Spock’s The Pocket-Book of Baby and Child Care first published in 1946, encouraged mothers to practice elaborate methods of infant feeding. They were to feed their babies on precise schedules and weigh them before and after feeding. In addition, mothers were to follow elaborate procedures for preparing formula using powdered, evaporated, or whole milk and to sterilize bottles, nipples, and bottle caps conscientiously. If breast-feeding their babies, mothers were to wean them to formula by three to seven months of age. The advice manuals also advocated the early introduction of solid foods. Bartlett, for example, recommended the introduction of cereal by three months of age, vegetables by five months, and bacon by eight months. Spock suggested that the early introduction of solids provided nutrients unavailable in milk, such as iron. Commercially canned vegetables, he advised, were as good as fresh vegetables strained at home. Many of the companies producing baby food and formula, including Gerber, Mellin’s, and Borden’s, circulated free booklets on child care emphasizing scientific approaches to infant feeding. The U.S. Children’s Bureau, through the publication of the booklet Infant Care, similarly emphasized the scientific nature of motherhood to millions of readers beginning in 1914.