When feeding bottles are used in public for fear of public exposure of breasts, or when women's reasons for choosing bottle feeding include fears that breastfeeding will alter the shape of their breasts, then women are being treated as sex objects. Women's fears about exposing their breast are more than confirmed when North American women are arrested or asked to leave public places for breastfeeding openly. Breastfeeding requires a new definition of women's work - one that more realistically integrates women's productive activities. In the sexual division of labour, infant care usually falls to women. It is women who have the capacity to provide food for their infants, ensuring women's self-reliance and their infants' survival for the first few months of life.
Women give birth and produce milk.
If the work of breastfeeding is valued as productive work, not a woman's duty, then conditions for its successful integration with other activities must be arranged. These arrangements include legislation to provide maternity leaves and nursing breaks, affordable child-care and other strategies developed by women workers. A woman-centred definition of work must take into consideration the importance of nurturance and caring, including breastfeeding. Breastfeeding encourages solidarity and co-operation among women at the household, community, national, and international level. Within households, women often work together to share child-care and other responsibilities.