"[2] She also coined the term “matrescence,” the rite of passage where “changes occur in a woman's physical state, in her status within the group, in her emotional life, in her focus of daily activity, in her own identity, and in her relationships with all those around her” through new motherhood.
[4] [5] Her research was not always respected: some Columbia faculty called her “the Tit Lady.”[6] Having avoided a conventional wedding and refused to take her husband's name (unusual in the 1950s), she rejected the common practice of bottle-feeding, but had difficulty breastfeeding her first-born son.
“The more my hungry son screamed, the guiltier I felt.”[1] She observed that new mothers had less social support than earlier in human history and that the sexualization of breasts in the postwar United States had led to cultural attitudes against breastfeeding.
[2] As an overarching framework for this study of maternity and early infant care, Raphael's theory of matrescence named motherhood as a significant social, cultural, political, and biological rite of passage.
“Giving birth,” she wrote, “does not automatically make a mother out of a woman.”[3] Dana Raphael was married to Howard Boone Jacobson, with whom she had three children: Seth, Jessa, and Brett.