She didn’t actually say “Breast Feeding” she just “she got finished nursing” and the whole poop thing is troubling to me. If the baby was already three weeks old he had probably pooped a couple of dozen times by then. I raised three kids and I can tell you it didn’t take more than once to figure out what to do....
That part bothers me too. Most new mothers (most, not all) would not consider handing over their newborn to someone else to change unless it was an immediate family member who was familiar with the baby.
Does anyone have the video of the Susan Blake interview? Transcript? I’ve never seen it. Every time I click on a link that purports to be this interview, I get a screen that says “not available.”
Re: babies pooping. Supposedly the baby was only DAYS old when Blake saw “Stannie” in Seattle. She very well may have had someone else doing all the “icky” stuff regarding the baby up until that time — nurses at the hospital, for instance. “Stannie” had never baby sat as a teen and didn’t much like babies, so she had no experience. I could see her readily handing off the kid to anyone handy to take care of the distasteful part of caring for him.
Re: breast feeding. Although not universal, there was a big push to encourage moms to breast feed in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I breastfed my first in 1960 and all of the subsequent babies after that. Certainly there were moms who didn’t, but most of my friends nursed their babies, especially in the early weeks. The doctors used to tell you that even if you only breast fed your child for 3 weeks, it provided the baby with all kinds of immunities that they could not get anywhere else. And it was safer for any child born in a region that had a questionable water supply (i.e. where you had to boil the water and sterilize the bottles.)
Now, most of us breastfed unobtrusively — in a bedroom, or in a “restroom”, not out in public. Except, I remember on obnoxious woman who used to attend Berkeley, CA School Board meetings, sit in the front row, and nurse her baby right in front of the Board. No modesty blanket to cover him, or her, either. That was Berkeley!
Thanks for the link. I have to say that I find it hard to believe that any adult female would say in 1961 that “of all [Susan Blake’s] friends that Stanley had the brains and the grace to raise a multiracial child”. Most white females of that generation (my mother’s generation) would have been appalled at Stanley Ann’s choice. I think this memory of Susan Blake is a little bit of PC revisionism.
Of course I grew up in CA, not Seattle. Perhaps there was a different attitude in Mercer Island. After all there were relatively few blacks in Seattle at the time, or even later when I lived their in the 1980s. And Susan Blake’s mama apparantly saw nothing wrong with sending her daughter to a school (Mercer Island High) that allowed courses on Communism and Marxism — indeed a whole wing of the school devoted to it. That certainly would not have been tolerated in my home town in CA.