History of the Breast
History of the Breast
- ISBN13: 9780345388940
- Condition: New
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In this provocative, pioneering, and wholly engrossing cultural history, noted scholar Marilyn Yalom explores twenty-five thousand years of ideas, images, and perceptions of the female breast–in religion, psychology, politics, society, and the arts.
Through the centuries, the breast has been laden with hugely powerful and contradictory meanings. There is the “good breast” of reverence and life, the breast that nourishes infants and entire communities, as depicted in ancient idols, fifteenth-century Italian Madonnas, and representations of equality in the French Revolution. Then there is the “bad breast” of Ezekiel’s wanton harlots, Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, and the torpedo-breasted dominatrix, symbolizing enticement and aggression
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a sweeping view of western art and attitudes about breasts,
I found this to be an easy to read, informative book about how the west has viewed the breast in art, politics and medicine. As a researcher in the sociology of reproduction, I was impressed by her synthesis of wet nursing and breastfeeding in her chapters on the politics of the breast. I found her analyses compelling. The review of how the breast appeared in art was new to me and here I appreciated Yalom’s writing style–accessible yet thorough. Her weakest chapters are the one on psychoanalytic treatment of the breast, and the one covering recent culture. I found her coverage and analysis of the psychoanalytic literature to be out of place and she didn’t seem to integrate it as well as I’d have liked in the politics/art of the time. The final chapter on recent cultural attitudes and representations of the breast could have been an entire book, so I felt a bit cheated. It wasn’t clear why she included some things and not others, and I think she gave short shrift to the current issues surrounding breastfeeding, esp. to characterizing La Leche League on the basis of one person’s anecdotal quote. But overall, a great introduction to the breast and definitely a stimulus to reading more, especially about non-Western attitudes toward the breast. It might have been interesting to include a cross-cultural chapter… Finally, the photographs are numerous, interesting, and nicely complement her analysis.
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|Fabulous,
With a wonderful blend of serious history and modern humor where appropriate, the author presents a thought provoking run down on the history over 25 centuries and the photos of Annie Sprinkles Bosom Ballet on page 268 made the purchase worth every cent.
As the author wisely notes that Westerners assumptions about the breast is often wrong, and that Non western cultures have their own fetishes be it small feet in China, the nape of the neck in Japan, the buttocks in Africa and the Caribbean. That through out western history the breast has been viewed as good and bad, and by men mostly and religious men in particular.
The book is excellent in showing how the breast has been used to depict power and justice be it in war posters (Bosoms For The Nation) or the lady of justice with one breast exposed. To breasts used to sell products or alas slaves. (The commercialized Breast) How the whole idea that breasts were owned according to some by the husband, or were considered babies domain. That it wasn’t until the women’s movement that women demanded that what was on their bodies belonged to them to do with as they wished, be it nipple piercing, nudity, no bra etc. (The liberated Breast)
There are photos of mastectomy survivors and lord knows dozens of bare, exposed, all size breasts, which I assume the reader would expect in a serious book about the human breast.
It is a book I am so glad I bought. Also check out her excellent History Of The Wife book.
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|MD/PhD Candidate,
Yalom’s book meets the highest standards for careful academic work, and, as a source, will turn out to be the standard for investigation into the subject in the future. But the appeal is broad and will engage the general reader, the historian, the physician. In short it is a good history, a good cultural study, and a good read. Fine writing, intriguing illustrations dilated to include such diversity as the political breast, the surgical breast, the nursing breast, the pornographic breast. An excellent analysis.
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