When I first moved to America more than a decade ago, I was fascinated by a piece of marketing I saw for a breast-pump. This picture depicted a woman in an executive suit hopping on to a private plane, carrying a briefcase that concealed a breast-pump, with a storage section for the milk.
It was very different from the pictures of breast-pumps I had seen in Europe, which presented soft-focus pictures of mothers sitting down at home, surrounded by domestic accessories. And since I was pregnant myself at the time, the new image seemed exhilarating. Never mind the fact that you were having a baby, the advert seemed to declare that anyone could still hold a high-powered job and keep breastfeeding their baby — even while hopping on an executive jet.
A decade later, however, I can also see a dark side in the cultural symbolism.