596488

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SACXXX10.1177/1206331215596488Space and CulturePorter and Oliver

Article
Space and Culture
1 ­–14
Rethinking Lactation Space: © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1206331215596488
Bodies, and the Politics of Inclusion sac.sagepub.com

Jennifer Porter1 and Robert Oliver2

Abstract
The 2001 dedication of the Lactation Support Program at Virginia Tech launched an initiative
meant to support the needs of breastfeeding employees and the progressive image of the
university as a family-friendly institution. While the program created clean, comfortable,
private spaces to express breastmilk, the institutionalization of lactation spaces in university
construction policy was not accompanied by a planned education piece and consequently an
opportunity to have a broader conversation about gender equity was lost. The absence of an
ongoing conversation about the meaning and purpose of this important spatial allotment meant
that the “production of space” was limited to the creation of a physical space, and failed to
consider how powerful these lactation rooms could be in representing not just the material
needs of some working mothers but also in facilitating a dialogue about what it means to be a
worker and a mother.

Keywords
workplace equity, gender, university policy, production of space, breastfeeding

In 1999, an employee at Virginia Tech established a small space in the university’s library to
express breastmilk1 during the workday. She soon brought her story of struggle to comfortably
express milk at work to the university’s women’s center as a potential narrative that may concern
other women on campus. After several meetings and informal surveys with various university
organizations and administrative offices, as well as the regional hospital, it was determined that
a new Lactation Support Program would be developed. According to the university’s Interim
Provost, James R. Bohland, the program “respond[ed] to a clear and present need for female
faculty, staff, and students who were having to nurse or express [breastmilk] in places that [were]
unsanitary, uncomfortable, and lacking in privacy” (Garon, 2001, para. 3). In April 2001, a dedi-
cation ceremony was held to commemorate the creation of the first three lactation rooms and to
celebrate the new directive to the University Architect for the inclusion of lactation rooms in all
capital construction or major renovation projects. By the fall of 2014, there were 23 lactation
spaces around campus in the renamed Nursing Moms’ Support Program.2 The creation of multi-
ple lactation rooms can be read as a strategic success for the university for at least three reasons:

1 University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

2 Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Jennifer Porter, Department of Geography, University of Washington, 422 Smith Hall, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Email: jlporter@uw.edu

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2 Space and Culture 

(1) lactation rooms provide a resource that meets the material needs of some women on the cam-
pus, (2) the rooms offer evidence of the university’s commitment to family-friendly policies, and
(3) the rooms serve to illustrate that the recruitment and retention of female employees matters.
However, the creation of lactation rooms also generates questions about what the production of
these spaces means to the construction of gendered roles and identities in the workplace: What
does it mean when private spaces are created that assume the necessity of seclusion for an
activity?
Lactation spaces in the workplace represent a unique success in an ongoing struggle to value
women as both workers and mothers. We are cognizant of Kobayashi, Peake, Benenson, and
Pickles’s (1994) argument that women’s movements have been less successful at challenging
gender roles in the workplace than in other areas such as suffrage and reproductive rights because
of historically sexualized spheres. Since the start of the 20th century, women’s movements have
struggled for equal pay, access to proscribed “male” jobs, state provided childcare, freedom from
pregnancy discrimination, and greater family and maternity leave rights (Berggren, 2008; Kelly
& Dobbin, 1999; Pyle & Pelletier, 2003; Stoltzfus, 2003). Judith Galtry (2000) suggests that
workplace lactation spaces occupy a unique position in this struggle as both a significant material
achievement and a theoretical opportunity. Lactation spaces, while enabling milk expression, a
sex-specific embodied activity, in the workplace allow parents to share in the responsibilities of
childcare and paid work. Thus, milk expression and bottle-feeding human milk occupy a unique
position in the equality-difference debate and challenge the normalcy of male embodiment in the
workplace (Galtry, 2000; Hausman, 2004).3
On the other hand, lactation spaces are a site of tension between creating a place for working
mothers and the rendering the maternal body invisible through spatial entrapment and the rhetoric
of workplace policy. While several scholars have identified breast pumps as a feminist technology
that increases mobility, infant feeding choices and independence for the mother, their potential
is constrained by cultural attitudes toward breastfeeding and milk expression, racial and class
restrictions, and the design of workplaces (Boswell-Penc & Boyer, 2007; Boyer, 2010; Johnson,
Williamson, Lyttle, & Leeming, 2009). Both Boswell-Penc and Boyer (2007) and Boyer (2010)
suggest that workplaces without designated lactation spaces construct milk expression as “out of
place,” which leads to anxiety over finding space or hostility from coworkers and bosses. However,
even those workplaces with designated lactation spaces may contribute to a “politics of banish-
ment” where milk expression, and by association mothering, are expected to be invisible. Further,
several scholars have suggested that breast pumps and lactation spaces cannot contribute to a
significant renegotiation of working bodies because they replace other initiatives such as on-site
childcare and paid parental leave (Blum, 1993; Boswell-Penc & Boyer, 2007; Galtry, 1997;
Johnson et al., 2009). The critical tension surrounding workplace lactation spaces is whether a
differentiated space can produce a worker who is not merely neutral and disembodied.
And yet, the prevailing logic supporting the creation of workplace lactations spaces and related
research rests on the support of breastfeeding as a health initiative and business best practice.
Whereas these spaces can be temporary and nonexclusive, it is argued that workplace lactation
rooms and support programs increase breastfeeding duration. Increased breastfeeding duration has
the potential to foster healthier mothers and babies, lower the strain on the medical system,
increase worker efficiency, reduce time lost to sick leave, and attract competitive employees inter-
ested in family-friendly workplaces (Drago, Hayes, & Yi, 2010; Health and Human Services
Office of Women’s Health, 2010; Shealy, Li, Benton-Davis, & Grummer-Strawn, 2005; Tuttle &
Slavit, 2009; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Service
Administration, and the Maternal and Child Health Bureau, 2008). And so, specific research on
workplace lactation programs have tended to focus on the ability of lactation programs to increase
breastfeeding duration (Cohen & Mrtek, 1994; Fein, Mandal, & Roe, 2008; Suyes, Abrahams, &
Labbok, 2008). But while lactation spaces may rely on the logic of supporting breastfeeding they

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Porter and Oliver 3

Figure 1.  Lactation room in Newman Library, 2012, photography. Photo by Jennifer Porter.

are not simply about breastfeeding; nevertheless the research on lactation spaces has focused on
their ability to impact breastfeeding rates. What is missing from this conversation is an investiga-
tion of why the production of lactation spaces is about more than creating a place to pump.
We argue that lactation spaces are instructive because they help us to reimagine how a seem-
ingly simple spatial allotment—a lactation room—can contribute to the reevaluation of what it
means to be a worker and situate the workplace as a site of meaningful politics. This study
explores the production and meanings of lactation space. We examine the development and
implications of the Lactation Support Program at Virginia Tech: a program established prior to
the existence of any policy mandate for designated lactation spaces. It arose from a collective
conversation between employees and university administration. Because the program is well
established and continues to operate, we can address the logic behind the program and investigate
how working mothers relate to the program today. Relying on primary documents and informa-
tion collected through a series of semistructured interviews with key administrative officers from
the Women’s Center, Work/Life Resources, the Coordinating Council of Women’s Concerns, the
Offices of the President and Provost, and women who have made choices about expressing milk
while employed by the university, we (1) describe the development and implementation of the
Lactation Support Program, (2) examine the impact on women through the production and main-
tenance of these spaces, and (3) propose that lactation spaces have the political potential to
rewrite the body in the workplace.

The Lactation Support Program at Virginia Tech

The Lactation Support Program began as three lactation rooms retrofitted into buildings on cam-
pus. Today the Nursing Mom’s Support Program provides 23 such rooms; each is designed to be
used by one person at a time. They are identified by a simple label reading, “Lactation Room,”
and are otherwise indistinguishable from other doors in the building (Figures 1 and 2). In order
to protect the hospital-grade breast-pumps available in some rooms and to keep accurate records
of use, women must register with human resources in order to obtain the specific codes to open
the doors. Each room also contains a log book so that a woman using the room can schedule her
occupancy. Other than a hospital-grade pump, each room contains a comfortable chair, a cabinet,

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4 Space and Culture 

Figure 2.  Lactation room in Surge Hall, 2012, photography. Photo by Jennifer Porter.

and some counter space. Some rooms also contain a bulletin board or other area to hang articles,
stories, notices, pictures, or other personal effects. Information about the lactation rooms and
other support for working mothers can be found online through human resources.

Development and Implementation

The impetus for the project began informally with meetings where female faculty, staff, and grad-
uate students struggling to find a comfortable, private space and time to express breastmilk shared
their experiences. The women had “been forced to use closets, stairwells and toilet stalls, which
are uncomfortable, unsanitary and inconvenient; some went to their cars in public parking lots.
Even those who had private offices, primarily faculty members, reported problems with privacy
and intrusion” (Meltsner & Jacobs, n.d., para. 3). Women who chose to continue to breastfeed or
bottle-feed breastmilk after returning to work found that there were no suitably private (i.e.,
secluded and free from interruption), nor appropriate (i.e., sanitary and comfortable) places to
express milk. The university’s Special Programs Coordinator for the Women’s Center, Jessie
Meltsner, and the Director of Work/Life Resources, Cathy Jacobs, brought the matter to the
Coordinating Council of Women’s Concerns. These two women, working in conjunction with a
network of supportive individuals across campus expedited the connections within the Offices of
the Provost and President that needed to be made in order to approve and fund the lactation rooms.
The strategic conversation surrounding the development of the Lactation Support Program at
Virginia Tech centered on breast-feeding as a best practice for health and business. Meltsner and
Jacobs articulated the program in various proposals as a means to demonstrate commitment to
women and families and to increase the recruitment and retention of competitive female faculty
members and their partners. Initial notices boldly summarized: “A permanent network of lacta-
tion facilities would be a relatively simple and cost effective demonstration of Virginia Tech’s

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Porter and Oliver 5

commitment to recruitment and retention of female staff and faculty” (Meltsner & Jacobs, 2000,
para. 3). This assumption, substantiated by other work on lactation spaces (Tuttle & Slavit, 2009),
is based on evidence that competitive employees, able to contribute to the quality and prestige of
the institution, are attracted to family-friendly policies that allow them to successfully balance
both work and family life. Moreover, programs that increase quality of life help to improve the
workplace environment and employee morale. Similarly, Virginia Tech’s Executive Vice President
and Chief Operating Officer, Minnis Ridenour (2000), claimed that the Lactation Support Program
would “create a supportive campus environment for new mothers who choose to breastfeed after
returning to work.” Ultimately, once the idea was presented to them, various stakeholders,
academic deans and department heads voiced unanimous support for the project (P. Hyer,
personal interview, November 7, 2011; P. Meszaros, personal interview, July 2, 2012).
The program was credited with enabling working mothers to return to work and to continue
breastfeeding without undue stress or difficulty, meeting the progressive goals of the university
and demonstrating the importance of women and families to the university (P. Meszaros, personal
interview, July 2, 2012; M. Ridenour, personal interview, June 13, 2012). For certain members of
the Women’s Center and Work/Life Resources at Virginia Tech, the Lactation Support Program
was a triumph, regardless of its actual use, because it supported the dual maternalist and feminist
goals of making breastfeeding a viable choice for working mothers and recognizing the impor-
tance of women in the workplace. The Provost, Executive Vice President, and other university
stakeholders celebrated the program because it created a more favorable environment for attract-
ing competitive faculty and it placed Virginia Tech at the leading edge of progressive policy
(M. Ridenour, personal interview, June 13, 2012). Ridenour continues to view the lactation rooms
as one project among many that supported the advancement of university goals to build “recognition
for the quality of its programs” (M. Ridenour, personal interview, June 13, 2012). The program
was developed alongside and received support from the VT Advance Grant, which encourages the
employment of female faculty and graduate students in science and engineering, allows tenure and
study pauses for pregnancy, and facilitates the acquisition of day care for employees.4 Ridenour
(personal interview, June 13, 2012) also suggested that he saw this program in the ranks of such
mid-1990s initiatives as Title IX5 in the United States and stated that in the same way Virginia
Tech supported equitable programming and female athletes before the federal mandate, it was also
one of the first universities without a medical school to implement permanent lactation spaces.
Like these other programs, the Lactation Support Program represented a concrete commitment to
progressive initiatives in the campus workplace.
The discourse for supporting lactation spaces may have rested on the benefits of breastfeeding
to health and business, but it is clear that key university officers saw these spaces as part of a
broader strategic plan to advance the image and prestige of Virginia Tech. Without question, the
initial project conception and dissemination was widely accepted. Nevertheless, it remains
imperative to pause and reflect on the later struggles to find appropriate spaces and to implement
a complementary education program.

Making Space
"There is nothing more precious than space at Virginia Tech" (Patricia Hyer, Associate Provost,
personal interview, November 7, 2011). Finding appropriate, uncontested spaces proved to be
one of the most substantial challenges in developing the Lactation Support Program. Rather than
see this struggle as a detriment to the program, the administrators from the Women’s Center,
Work/Life Resources and the Coordinating Council of Women’s Concerns saw the challenge as
critical evidence of the importance of the program to the university because finding space for
anything (classrooms, offices, storage, etc.) on campus was, and remains, a significant undertaking.
Claiming space to create places specifically for the use of women to express breastmilk implied

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6 Space and Culture 

Figure 3.  Lactation room in the handicap stall of a women’s bathroom on the third floor of Durham
Hall, 2012, photography. Photo by Jennifer Porter.

a commitment to working mothers and demonstrated that those mothers and their families were
valuable to the university.
The original proposal included a spatial plan to identify high concentrations of women younger
than 45 years and place lactation rooms according to that data. Ultimately, only a few rooms were
retroactively fitted into buildings and none were placed according to the spatial data because find-
ing space for new rooms in existing buildings was “always difficult, amazingly difficult” due to
departmental needs for office space, ventilation and lighting standards, and the requirements of the
Americans with Disabilities Act (Jacobs, personal interview, November 19, 2011). The first three
rooms, as well as other retrofits, were typically in bathrooms and bathroom antechambers (Figure
3). Subsequent rooms were added to new buildings and buildings undergoing major renovations
through a directive to the University Architect.
This new directive to the University Architect required “the inclusion of dedicated lactation
facilities into new capital construction or major renovations on campus wherever appropriate”
(Ridenour, 2000). At the very least, new office buildings would have lactation rooms. An impor-
tant implication of the directive was that it would ensure the Lactation Support Program expanded
in pace with the university’s growth. The directive made the analysis of spatial data on female
employees less critical because spaces would be included in all new buildings or buildings under-
going major renovation regardless of who occupied the building. Meltsner (personal interview,
April 28, 2011) notes,

We started out with this what we hoped would be meaningful, but seemed a little bit like window
dressing because it was just a start, but meaningful window dressing. It turned very quickly into an
institutional directive that really just meant that it was very quickly a part of the plan, the major
structural plan of the university.

The directive institutionalized lactation spaces as an understood necessity for both employees of
the university and visitors to the campus, that would need to adjust over time to meet the needs
of a growing univeristy population. The institutionalization of lactation spaces and their incorpo-
ration into long-term plans for the university affirmed the university’s recognition of working
mothers who chose to breastfeed or express breastmilk on campus.

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Porter and Oliver 7

For several university officers, the institutionalization of lactation spaces represented a turning
point at Virginia Tech in social expectations of gender and what aspects of a worker’s life are
valued (J. Meltsner, personal interview, April 28, 2011; P. Meszaros, July 2, 2012; M. Ridenour,
June 13, 2012). Meltsner (personal interview, April 28, 2011) suggests that the existence of
lactation spaces normalizes a woman’s request for time to express breastmilk and therefore
removes potential shame and difficulty in negotiating the workplace as a parent. Ridenour
(personal interview, June 13, 2012) links the significance of lactation space to breastfeeding
practices as well as progressive gender relations:

Well if you believe in the concept of breastfeeding, then lactation spaces have to have a relationship
to that, and if you want to attract women and retain women in the workplace, then you have to
provide resources for that quality of life to remain in place, it’s the right thing to do. To me that’s the
right thing to do rather than say, “Well my mother didn’t have it, so why should you?”

In recent interviews Ridenour (personal interview, June 13, 2012) and Provost Emerita Peggy
Meszaros (personal interview, July 2, 2012) reflected on the development of the program by
applauding the private, discrete design of the rooms for increasing usage, while suggesting that
if presented with the project again they would insist on a more rigorous application of mapping
techniques to identify places that reflect where users actually work. Both criticized the use of
bathroom space because it sends the wrong message about breastfeeding practices and the women
who requested these spaces. Bathrooms, and other scavenged space, could imply mere accom-
modation, rather than a true effort to incorporate these practices into the university landscape and
culture. These concerns suggest that for these university officers’ lactation spaces is about more
than a place to express breastmilk, but facilities the incorporation of women as a group into the
organization of the university.
The directive to the University Architect indicates that several administrators and major officers
recognized the need for an identifiable strategy that supports working mothers who express milk.
Yet those responsible for the creation of the Lactation Support Program also recognized that the
physical existence of these spaces would not suffice since women had struggled to find the time as
well as the space to express breastmilk. The initial proposal also included plans for a complemen-
tary education policy that would ensure a more thorough reflection of women’s workplace needs
(i.e., time to express milk, the stress of parenthood, and meeting deadlines/work expectations, etc.).

Education and Dissemination

Once the lactation rooms were established there was a concentrated effort to inform women on
campus of this new service. Announcements were released through various email listservs, bro-
chures, new employee packets, and local OB/GYNs and lactation consultants. It was crucial that
the rooms’ locations were broadly advertised because of their discrete nature and because the
spaces were secured with individual door locks to ensure privacy and security for expensive
hospital grade pumps. Registration also ensured accurate record keeping and continued mainte-
nance of the program. To aid these efforts, and to make the transition back to work for new moms
easier, initial proposals from the Women’s Center and Work/Life Resources included education
for supervisors and department heads.
Part of the education program involved informing supervisors and department heads about the
Lactation Support Program, its purpose, and the rights of their employees to access these spaces.
According to Interim Provost James Bohland, the university

hop[ed] to accomplish university wide . . . a sense that each individual mother does not need to
negotiate or depend upon the goodwill of a supervisor in order to be assured that suitable facilities
and flexible scheduling will be available when needed . . .” (Bohland, 2000, para. 3)

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8 Space and Culture 

Rather than place sole responsibility on individual women to seek out these spaces and negotiate
break time with their supervisors, the education program was designed to ensure a continuing
conversation about lactation spaces in particular and the needs of working mothers more gener-
ally. The conversation would have been facilitated through an online short course ending with a
competency quiz, much like the common training for Institutional Review Board ethics approval.
These short courses were never implemented and the broader education program was largely
abandoned. According to Jacobs (personal interview, November 19, 2011), there was a perceived
intrusion on the rights of supervisors to insist on mandatory education about infant feeding and
lactation. Meszaros (personal interview, July 2, 2012) also offered that the spaces might be seen
as independent, self-sustaining resources, especially with the directive to the University Architect,
so that continued intervention through an education program seemed superfluous. This loss is
problematic because, without institutionally mandated education, the responsibility for negotiat-
ing what could be a difficult and uncomfortable conversation with a supervisor, who may know
little to nothing about the needs of working mothers, was placed on the individuals who sought
out these spaces.
When we interviewed employees at Virginia Tech in 2012, the most common response con-
cerning the expression of breastmilk during the workday was that, “You really don’t know what
you don’t know.” The 21 women interviewed held a variety of positions within the university
including administrative staff, graduate students, laboratory associates, and faculty.6 Eleven had
a private workspace and, of those, three used the lactation rooms occasionally. Ten women
worked in a shared office or lab space and, of those, three used the lactation spaces regularly.
Only two participants used the lactation rooms exclusively, the others incorporated a variety of
spaces based on their physical location, the availability of information and resources, work con-
straints, the ability to breastfeed their infant during work hours (which meant either going home,
visiting a nearby day care, or having a partner bring the infant to campus), and individual needs
for privacy and comfort. While many women had a plan that worked effectively from day to day,
most women had no or incomplete information about the Nursing Mom’s Support Program.
Compared with maternity leave, childcare, and schedule flexibility, breastmilk expression is not
a priority before returning to work and as a result many women did not actively seek out informa-
tion on expressing milk until after returning from leave.
It is critical to note that the university’s human resources department does maintain a website
outlining the Nursing Mom’s Support Program and the benefits of breastfeeding. The website
also includes current federal, state, and university policies related to milk expression during
the workday, tips for talking with supervisors and incorporating milk expression into a workday
schedule, as well as local support resources. In addition, it provides a list of the various lactation
rooms, spaces containing hospital grade pumps, as well as information on how new users can
register for the program. Unfortunately, this repository of information is rarely consulted—only
6 of the 21 women we interviewed knew about this site or had accessed it. More commonly,
information on negotiating working motherhood and the lactation rooms came from informal
sources such as word-of-mouth, networking with other mothers and friends, and seeing the
spaces during campus activities. As a result, access to lactation space often depends on whom
you know. For example, one graduate student started using the lactation space in a nearby building
after responding to the advertisement for this research. She had been expressing milk in her lab
cubicle for several months and even after contacting the Graduate School about resources for
parents and the school’s medical facilities, she remained unaware of the Nursing Mom’s Support
Program. This was a common narrative among young mothers at the university and recent hires
who may not be connected to established networks, and for women who occasionally held
programs or meetings in areas of campus away from their normal work environment. Ironically,
when asked how they felt the university was doing and how it could improve the program, these
women responded that they felt lactation spaces and the Nursing Mom’s Support Program were

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Porter and Oliver 9

a strong symbol of support from the university but they wanted a central, easily accessed location
with information about their rights, the program, and how to talk to supervisors.
Although most of the women we interviewed were able to express milk comfortably and
either continue to provide breastmilk for their infants or breastfeed after returning to work the
weak connections between the Nursing Mom’s Support Program and potential users undermines
the initial spirit of the production of lactation spaces at Virginia Tech. The ultimate failure of the
lactation support program is less a problem of design or siting alone, but rather stems from the
lack of a continued conversation. In this case, the production of lactation space did not necessarily
render the maternal body invisible or preclude other progressive policy but rather served as a
capstone that prevented continued negotiation over the identities and responsibilities of working
within and outside of the workplace. Passive sources of information and loose connections
between potential users and the program have rendered the political act of creating the Lactation
Support Program less meaningful and has served to further entrench the maternal body as out of
place in the workplace.

Rethinking the “Right” of Lactation Space

What is at stake in designing private spaces for an activity in which the necessity of seclusion is
assumed? Put another way, what is at stake in designing private, often invisible, spaces for a
group that has been historically excluded from the formal workplace? Policies that limit time
allocated for maternity leave as well as personal preference often cause women to return to work
while their infant may still be breastfeeding. In order to continue to provide breastmilk there
needs to be a clean, comfortable, private space to express milk during the workday. However,
since these spaces are often low-cost, discrete, and effective for increasing breastfeeding duration
they risk replacing other progressive initiatives such as longer parental leave, schedule flexibility,
and on-site childcare. Rather than reshape the workplace with a female worker in mind, lactation
spaces may serve to closet lactation as a female-body specific act to maintain the universal dis-
embodied individual. Joan Acker (1990) argues that workplace organizations are gendered from
the start because the ideal worker is totalized by the job; they have no other roles and functions
outside of those capacities. Acker (1990) claims that while many scholars and activists have
viewed the workplace organization as neutral, it is necessary to shift our understanding of the
gendered underpinnings of organizations to enact progressive change. Acker’s theory underlines
the concerns addressed in the critical literature on lactation spaces (Blum, 1993; Boswell-Penc &
Boyer, 2007; Galtry, 1997; Johnson et al., 2009). However, through addressing the production of
lactation rooms as part of a viable Lactation Support Program, we argue that the implications of
lactation space in the workplace can occupy a liminal space between asking for inclusion in a
“male” space and rewriting the working body.
Administrators and university officers did not ask women at Virginia Tech to be spatially
complacent in their exclusion from common space; rather women asked the university to recognize
their inclusion through secluded spaces. Individual women with private concerns about milk
expression during the workday came together as a group to present breastmilk expression as a
general concern in the workplace and request administrative action. Not only do lactation spaces
create a place for the female body and intimate responsibilities in the workplace that otherwise
would not exist, but they represent significant political negotiation in a site traditionally resistant
to civic action and gendered activism.
Consistent with Iris Marion Young’s (1990) arguments about affirmative action, the inclusion
of lactation spaces and policy challenges the principles of nondiscrimination and individuality in
the workplace. Young argues that while oppression can be perpetuated by individuals, “[i]n its
focus on individual agents, the concept of discrimination obscures and even tends to deny the
structural and institutional framework of oppression” (Young, 1990, p. 196). Rather than address

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10 Space and Culture 

each employee who seeks to express milk as an individual, the production of lactation space is an
intervention on behalf of a specific group to overcome historical oppression that has excluded
women from the workplace due to their reproductive capacities. Rather than be “out of place” in
stairwells, bathrooms, and closets, women at Virginia Tech demanded they be recognized with a
“place” within the institution. Further, for Young overcoming structural and institutional frame-
works of oppression means populating positions within institutions with people who can “. . .
mitigate the influence of current biases and blindnesses of institutions and decisionmakers”
(Young, 1990, p. 198). While the program at Virginia Tech is not responsible for directly hiring
more working mothers in positions of authority, it does open the possibility that women will
apply for and be successful in those positions. The production of lactation space is fecund with
opportunity if viewed, in Rob Shields’s language, as social spatialization or part of an ongoing
negotiation (Shields, 1997).
The institutionalization of lactation rooms from both policy and spatial perspectives acknowl-
edged a need to address disparate (and often uncomfortable, unsanitary, and discouraging) strat-
egies to express breastmilk during the workday and actively include women in the planning of
this major university initiative. However, there remains tension between Bohland’s comments
suggesting that women do not need to negotiate or depend on their supervisors and their often
incomplete knowledge of university procedures. The university, by adopting a passive approach
to facilitating women’s knowledge and use of lactation rooms, illustrates Georges Benko’s
notion of creating postmodern nonspaces. Benko (1997) identifies nonspace as a condition of
“solitary individuality and non-human mediation between the individual and the collective”
(p. 26). The spaces themselves are symbols emptied of meaningful politics and read as the
conclusion to a political conversation rather than a node in a historically rooted and ongoing
conversation of what it means to be a worker.
The spaces rectify a greater injustice of inclusion-at-all, and so mask the less imminent
concerns related to work culture and the relationship between reproductive bodies and productive
work. The materiality of lactation rooms, as spaces that take up valued resources and can be seen,
touched, and experienced day-to-day, inoculates a sense of realness and privilege that obscures
actual access. All of the women we interviewed, regardless of whether they had used or known
about the Nursing Mom’s Support Program, saw the spaces as a clear sign of support from the
university and as a privilege. Many were careful in criticizing the program because it was better
than nothing or better than what their friends had at other organizations. However, these women
also articulated fears about being seen as a mother in the workplace. When asked to imagine
an ideal program, most women suggested greater access to information so they did not have
to worry about discrimination or the risk of being seen as a “milk-making machine” rather than
a worker:

Reach out and say, these are the things that women will feel: they’re going to feel guilty for having
to leave . . . these are the kind of spaces they might need, this is . . . how often it occurs, so they’re
not making excuses just to slip out of meetings because they’re bored, you know just to make it more
acceptable. (Anna, personal interview, November 8, 2012)7
I don’t want people to think that they shouldn’t hire me or they don’t want to work with me on a
project because I can only commit to a certain number of hours before I have to excuse myself . . . so
I think it’s the university’s role to support, to verbally even, support women in saying . . . we will wait
for you to come back, we will make room for this, and we will not make it seem like it’s a problem
for you to do that. (Megan, personal interview, November 15, 2012)
I wish that they were more open in supporting, for example if you could see advertisements through
the email or on the webpage or in the newspaper or in the hallways, saying families can breast-feed
at Virginia Tech, you’re ok to breast-feed your child, so I wouldn’t feel afraid for my colleagues to
know, so that they would know it’s my right to breastfeed and that it’s good and then I wouldn’t feel

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Porter and Oliver 11

uncomfortable letting people know. I think it would be good if the university took a more active role
in creating the culture for people to feel safe doing it. (Kate, personal interview, November 5, 2012)

While major university officers and administrators recognized the legitimacy of women’s claim
for space to express breastmilk, the allocation of space alone does not account for the everyday
interactions between a woman and her work responsibilities, supervisor, or coworkers. Lost in
the attempt to accommodate nursing mothers was a more nuanced conversation about the place
of the female body and the relationship between the body and work.
The problem of invisibility in creating private spaces for women to express milk is not physical
nor a specific block to other progressive initiatives. Discretion and privacy have been favored
over a more focused attempt to deliver on the broader policy of creating an accepting campus
for women, pregnant, nursing, or otherwise—risking the production of spatial domination that
reinforces the female body as secluded and “different.” In general the program resulted from a
negotiation that recognized what breastfeeding mothers as a group wanted (private, comfortable,
and sanitary spaces that met their needs to express milk during the workday) and the place of
lactation spaces within a suite of other progressive programming that recognizes the significance
of women and reproductive roles to the university (like AdvanceVT). Where the program shifts
from a spatial process overflowing with potential to rewrite workplace roles and bodies, to an
isolating program that refocuses responsibility on individual women is in the weak connections
between the program, potential users, and other employees at the university. Without an extended
conversation about the purpose of these spaces, the result is that while these spaces may rightly
be celebrated because they do create an opportunity for working mothers who choose to nurse to
remain in the workplace, they are isolated from general support for all mothers and working
women’s desire for a more socially and spatially accessible workplace.

Conclusion
The Lactation Support Program at Virginia Tech can be read as a unique success in a long struggle
to expand the place of motherhood without restricting the autonomy of individual women. These
rooms, as physical spaces, expand the working identities that are possible: Lactation rooms
support the potential for women to be workers and mothers. University administrators have
acknowledged through the support of a strategic program that women on campus have identifi-
able needs when it comes to expressing milk. Through these spaces many working mothers feel
that their presence on campus is legitimized. Still, without broad public conversation about the
“why” of lactation spaces, not just as sites that promote breastfeeding but also as places for the
inclusion of the female body, women become more exposed, not as a private group with public
interests, but as individual women. To date, the university administrators have not engaged in
this conversation, choosing to limit their participation to the role of service providers, in this
case mandating the construction of lactation rooms.
We have sought to engage with the production of a single workplace Lactation Support
Program in order to address critical theoretical concerns about the role lactation rooms in the
workplace play in workplace politics, gender parity, and the bright-line between equality and
difference. What emerges at Virginia Tech reinforces the tension present in these debates as the
program demonstrates both an ability to open the possibilities for working identities while simul-
taneously closing off the potential for an ongoing conversation about the relationships between
workers and relationships that exceed the workplace. As a sex-differentiated space, lactation
rooms have the ability to be inclusive, but when seen as the end goal in a conversation about
working mothers they neutralize the politics of the matter and inoculate a sense of closure that
discourages individuals from collectivizing.

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12 Space and Culture 

The consequence of seeing lactation spaces as catering to a few nursing mothers is the reification
of assumptions about privacy, motherhood, and the female body. In the absence of an ongoing
education program, the conversation about what lactation spaces represent is largely muted. This
may lead to further isolation of individual women who are solely responsible for the conversation
that would allow them to use the space. In this way, lactation rooms risk becoming a mere product
to address a momentary need, rather than a meaningful site within a larger ongoing conversation
about the working body and the gendered-relationships within and exceeding the workplace. Yet
we believe there are other ways of seeing and interacting with lactation space that exceed the
bounds of a formal policy.
More work needs to be done to reveal, as Kobayashi et al. (1994) put it, a history of sexualized
spheres, especially as they continue to manifest themselves on university campuses. Lactation
spaces have the potential to create a more expansive definition of the material needs of women
as workers and future work in this arena should shift from policy to consider the day-to-day
experiences of women on a campus with lactation rooms. How do women use these spaces? How
do women navigate interacting with each other, coworkers, and supervisors about and around
these spaces? Do these spaces act to restructure relationships within the workplace? And what
can lactation rooms reveal about mundane workplace cultures? Lactation space, seen as an end
product, may serve to further isolate individual women and restrict a conversation about gender
equity in the workplace, but seen as process and part of an ongoing conversation can assist in the
move beyond gendered organizations.

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Peter Goheen, Korine Kolivras, Marian Mollin and Barbara Ellen Smith for their
invaluable feedback on early drafts of this paper and the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech for their
support. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their time and constructive comments.
We would also like to thank the participants in this work and Jesse Meltsner for provisioning detailed
records of the case, without which this paper would not be possible.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. We would like to recognize that there are many legitimate ways that mothers, parents, and guardians
decide to feed their infants. These choices do not occur in a vacuum by an individual, but are always
embedded in networks of continuous decision making. Infant feeding strategies are often messy and
fluctuating negotiations between multiple actors: mothers, babies, bodies, partners, caregivers, extended
family, workplaces, and health care providers. Most infant feeding strategies use some combination of
breastfeeding, bottle-feeding formula, milk expression by hand or mechanical pump, and bottle-feeding
breastmilk. After returning to work from maternity leave, if a mother wishes to continue to provide
breastmilk, either through the breast or a bottle, she will either need to secure breastmilk from a donation
bank or express breastmilk while she is away from her baby in order to maintain a supply.
2. When the original data were collected for this project in 2012, there were 19 spaces.
3. See Scott (1988) for a more in-depth exploration of the equality-versus-difference debate within
feminism.
4. For more information on AdvanceVT there is a website administered through the university (Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2015).

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Porter and Oliver 13

5. “Title IX is a law passed in 1972 that requires gender equity for boys and girls in every educational
program that receives federal funding” (The Margaret Fund of NWLC, 2015).
6. Although specific efforts were made to recruit housekeeping and maintenance staff for this research,
there are no participants in these positions. From the anecdotal data from 1999, it is clear that women in
these positions have often found it harder to express milk during the workday because of rigid schedules
and lack of even semiprivate workspace. However, we cannot suggest how these women relate to or
experience lactation space today.
7. The names of people interviewed outside of their professional capacity have been changed.

Websites of Interest
1. Nursing Mom’s Support Program, Virginia Tech: http://www.hokiewellness.hr.vt.edu/Occupational/
NursingMomsSupport.aspx
2. Federal and State laws related to breastfeeding and milk expression: http://www.ncsl.org/research/
health/breastfeeding-state-laws.aspx

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Author Biographies
Jennifer Porter is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington,
Seattle. Her research explores the politics of intimate violence and the continuities of public and private
space through landscape.
Robert Oliver is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Virginia Tech. His research
investigates the intersections of public space, symbolism, and entrepreneurial urbanism.

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