the ww2 generation didn’t all breast feed...at least my mother and her contemporaries didn’t.. my mil didn’t...they were taught that formula was best...thus the great assault on natural mother hood and a good marriage started.
Contrary to what wifty liberals would have us believe, in many ways the 50s was the most “modern” decade in history.
We got to thinking we could reduce everything to its bare elements and perfect it scientifically.
Didn’t need human milk, we could synthesize a better formula in a lab. We learned to grow crops and raise animals not in backyards with manure and hay but in huge mechanized farms with chemical fertilizer and feed. Traditional neighborhoods could be bulldozed to put up planned communities and highways.
Sure there were real advances in the science of chemistry and everything else, but there was a mania to scentifically “perfect” and “improve” that really lost sight of the human aspects of these things, and their interconnectedness.
In that way, we are more conservative now than the post-war generation was.