Epigraphs

Epigraph

If she is to demedicalise her experience; relish (rather than suffer) her body’s turbulent fruitfulness or ‘jouissance’; and find the political power to protect her own and her young children’s complex psychobiological needs, the milkmother must write herself into the cultural imaginary.*

Encouraging words which helped me write Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation when the going got tough (and which might be encouraging for you, too)

We have to invent new wisdom for a new age. And in the meantime we must, if we are to do any good, appear unorthodox, troublesome, dangerous, disobedient. John Maynard Keynes

All great truths begin as blasphemies. George Bernard Shaw

Real female innovation (in whatever … field) will only come about when maternity, female creation and the link between them are better understood. Julia Kristeva

In arguing that we have by no means yet explored or understood our biological grounding, the miracle and paradox of the female body … I am really asking whether women cannot begin, at last, to think through the body, to connect with … our highly developed tactile sense; our genius for close observation; our complicated, pain-enduring, multi-pleasured physicality. Adrienne Rich

A new mystique is needed, but a mystique associated with the highest level of comprehensive knowledge and critical competence. Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry

I suspect that both my subconscious and the living world were asking something of me, just as our shared moment of crisis is now asking something of us all. ... After all, it looks as if solidarity, rather than science, will be the force of human genius most likely to save our species. Tim Winton

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on ... you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no results at all, perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself ... The big results are not in your hands or mine. Thomas Merton

... I and the other women this exceptional act with the exceptional heroic body, this giving [milk]. Sharon Olds (last word changed by PD from 'birth' to 'milk')

References

*Douglas, Pamela. The Milkmother. Doctor of Philosophy The University of Queensland, Women's Studies, 2012.

Keynes, John Maynard. Am I a Liberal? The Nation and Athenaeum. 8 and 15 August 1925, quoted in Kernick D. Wanted - new methodologies for health service research. Is complexity theory the answer? Family Practice. 2006;23(3):385-390, p. 390

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi, Columbia University Press, 1986 p. 298

Merton, Thomas. Letter to a Young Activist, 21 February 1966 (context Vietnam War) found in The Road to Joy, Robert Daggy (ed) 1990.

Olds, Sharon. The Language of the Brag. From Satan Says. University of Pittsburg Press 1980, substituting the word 'milk' for 'birth'.

Swimme, B & Berry, T. The Universe Story. Harper San Francisco/Harper Collins, 1992 p. 4

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W.W. Norton, 1976 p. 284

Winton, Tim. Born of Nightmares, The Monthly October 2024 p. 20-21