Mother Bottle-Feeding Infant, American Living Room, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Mother Bottle-Feeding Infant, American Living Room, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Mother Bottle-Feeding Infant, American Living Room, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-6854AD

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Sometime in the 1950s, a young mother settled into a blue upholstered armchair to give a bottle to an infant, and someone decided this was worth photographing — which it was, though not for the reasons anyone present understood. The room behind her is doing its level best to be a proper postwar American home: the end table with its tapered black legs and butterfly-shade lamp is exactly what the furniture showroom had recommended, and the small framed picture and knickknacks arranged on its lower shelf suggest a household still in the optimistic early phase of accumulating the correct objects.

The mother is in a housedress, feet in open-backed sandals, entirely absorbed in the task. In this decade, the formula industry had successfully persuaded a generation of American women that the scientific approach to infant feeding was the modern, correct one, and the bottle she holds is the emblem of that confidence. Pediatric opinion would reverse itself thoroughly within twenty years.

The room is nearly bare — carpet, chair, lamp, wall — the spare look of a young family in a new house that hasn't filled in yet, or possibly just moved. The baby has no opinion on any of this and is eating.

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