Governing breastfeeding and the making of the ‘good mother’: clinical routines and welfare support in the Czech lands, 1900–1938

Breastfeeding in the Czech lands between 1900 and 1938 was treated less as one option among others and more as the baseline against which maternal competence was measured. Based on medical advice literature, midwifery training texts, and interwar welfare guidance, this article shows how feeding was reorganised into a disciplined routine of hygienic preparation, fixed intervals, repeated weighing, and written records. These procedures pulled infant care into the orbit of clinical authority. They made an intimate practice observable, comparable, and correctable, and they turned ‘good motherhood’ into something that could be demonstrated through technique, regularity, and compliance. Alternatives to maternal milk, including supplementation, ‘artificial feeding’, and wet nursing, were not framed as equivalent solutions. They appear instead as medically sanctioned departures, tolerated as temporary and placed under supervision so that breastfeeding could remain the unquestioned standard. Interwar welfare provision strengthened this arrangement by connecting clinic routines and documentation with access to advice and, at times, material support, which made oversight part of everyday household strategy rather than only pedagogical instruction. The ideal circulated widely, but it was never evenly attainable. Its feasibility depended on class position, work schedules, geography, and unequal access to teaching and services. By tracing how breastfeeding was organised, monitored, and defended as a norm, the article argues that motherhood was governed through maternity, via routinised measurement and the management of exceptions, and that institutional credibility increasingly depended on how everyday infant care was performed and documented.