Only Mothers Know

Only Mothers Know is a very good, indeed a consummate, summary of research, discussion, and controversy, and it is also a very levelheaded as well as compassionate appeal to common sense, to valid cultural experience, and to the realism of Third World modernization. Raphael's project has come a long way from the passionate concern of the early days of the rediscovery of breastfeeding and of female wisdom. Such concern still guides her, of course and righly, but it is tempered (and honored) by her balancing of the politics and faddism of the movement she put into motion so long ago with the realities of the traditions and resources of women in the changes and the calculations of the modern world. She's written us a saga of survival and devotion that must not be missed, either by mothers and their doulas or by doctors, or by an educated, independent public. Conrad Arensberg, Columbia University