Norman Rockwell's work was unique. And humbling. For those of us who can't draw, at all, just imagine the genius and patience it must have taken to create his paintings. He also has a special place in our hearts because from 1939-53 he was a neighbour and friend of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's in Arlington, Vermont. Well of course they would have been friends! Although in fact we did not know that when we put one of his paintings on the Classic edition of The Home-Maker. This is a Vermont-era Rockwell called 'Victory in Defeat', she might be the sister of the boy on the front of The Home-Maker.

This is the saddest breastfeeding image imaginable. It is so beautifully made (look at the folds of material!) and so heartrending. It's an 1821 memorial, by the sculptor Francis Chantrey in St Mary's Church, Waterperry, Oxfordshire, to Anna Maria Rooke Greaves who died in childbirth at the age of 27 leaving a  baby of six months. And a husband.

This is a piece of late eighteenth century porcelain in the Wellcome  Collection; one can't quite see it on a shelf or mantelpiece nowadays but in fact why on earth not? 

The Fashionable Mamma or The Convenience of Modern Dress by James Gillray: a satirical but very good-humoured 1796 engraving showing a mother breast-feeding before leaving the house..

'From the seventeenth century in Britain there was a proliferation of church monuments depicting mothers breastfeeding their infants.' At St Mary's, Chirk there is a monument by John Bushnell, c.1676, showing Sir Thomas Myddleton's wife Elizabeth who died when she was 22, several days after her only son was born. She is shown eternally feeding her baby from her right breast as she gazes out and down, away from the child, into the space of the congregation. 

Breastfeeding is the subject of the Post this week, not breastfeeding as we know it but rather wet-nurses. They have been largely written out of history but Sue Laurence's book The Hand that Rocked the Cradle: The Art of Birth and Infancy (2018) has an interesting section about them. This is Gabrielle d'Estrées au Bain in a 1598 oil paining. The mistress of Henri IV is standing in a bath of milk with a thin piece of material draping her; meanwhile, the wet nurse is feeding the baby, Alexandre de Bourbon. Very sadly Gabrielle died in 1599 after giving birth to a stillborn child – a reminder, if it were needed, how very dangerous giving birth used to be and how brave women were.

The greatest of all our authors was Hilda Bernstein (1915-2006). Although the cause which she fought against was apartheid rather than the oppression of women, in the week of International Women's Day she must be celebrated as a woman of supreme courage and compassion. In the October Biannually we shall reprint some of the poetry she wrote while in prison in South Africa. We are deeply proud of all our books but The World that was Ours has a special place in our heart.