Edwina Froelich may not be household name, but millions of mothers who have nursed a child, have been influenced by her wisdom. Edwina died recently and her community lives on, in the form of La Leche League International.

A Wall Street Journal article is telling in how Froehlich came to have a bigger voice:

"Meeting monthly in Edwina Froehlich’s suburban-Chicago living room, a group of seven mothers helped make America and then the world, safe for breast-feeding….At first, it was a supportive kaffekatsch of seven women, all with babies at breast…But within months of being founded in 1956, the La Leche League was spreading information to a wider network."

Remarkable Wisdom

At a time when the norm was to bottle-feed babies, Froehlich was counter-cultural in her wisdom. Quoting again from the WSJ article:

"Most doctors at that time reacted with annoyance or disgust if a woman dared to state that she wanted to breastfeed…Why set the clock back 50 years?….We felt a mother should listen to her body, her nature….We felt that feeding a baby was not a medical matter, it was a maternal matter."

Her wisdom came from her own experience as a first-time mother at 35 years old and seeing how natural it was for her son to "latch on like a barracuda."

Marketing

Froehlich was savvy with marketing. She understood that newspapers wouldn’t cover the group’s meetings if it used the "b" word. So they chose a phrase inspired by a Florida shrine that meant "Our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk." Hence the name, La Leche.

Community-Building and Bottom-Up Change

The seven founders of La Leche didn’t set out to persuade doctors of another viewpoint. Instead they attracted those most impacted by the prevailing wisdom of bottle-feeding. They went right to the mothers. In creating a way to certify local chapters of La Leche, they built a community of kindred spirits. The history of La Leche, also provides some noteworthy points about creating a bottom up movement, using networking, technology, and marketing.

• It took 16 years from the founding of La Leche to see a rise in lactation rates and continued as a consistent trend upward for a decade.
• Two years later, La Leche had enough influence to be accredited for continuing medical education credits with the American Medical Association.
• La Leche later created alliances with organizations that had large audiences–including the World Health Organization and UNICEF.
• In the 80’s, thirty years after the founding of La Leche, a Peer Counselor Program was started and mother-to-mother programs were established in developing countries. Meanwhile, books were published (including one based on the notebook of information compiled by the seven founders), a research center was established, and an 800-number was launched to provide mothers with the information they need.
• Today, La Leche has on their website user forums and a clearly stated philosophy and mission. They have codified the wisdom of the original founders, including Froehlich’s, and provided an online gathering place for the community to grow.

Can you imagine how the journey would have been accelerated, the impact magnified even more, if these seven mothers had today’s technology? It’s what makes me so excited about ABV.

To understand more of Froehlich and her remarkable wisdom, see this YouTube video. You’ll see the spirit of a radical and an innovator in just a few seconds.