Lactation rooms across the United States tell a story that few want to confront. Some are bright and welcoming. Others are converted closets, bathroom stalls, or spare rooms tucked away from public view. What they all share is a raw exposure of the tensions that working mothers face daily in a country that refuses to guarantee paid family leave.
Photographer Corinne May Botz set out to document these spaces through a project that became a book called Milk Factory. Her goal was straightforward but ambitious: make visible the invisible labor of pumping, and in doing so, reveal something deeper about what modern motherhood looks like in America.
The United States stands alone among wealthy nations for not offering paid family leave. This absence forces millions of women back to work weeks after giving birth, creating a widespread need for places to pump breast milk during the workday. The lactation room, then, is not a luxury or a perk. It is a necessity born from policy failure.
One woman who teaches at a school described the logistics vividly. During lunch, she had to rush from her third-floor classroom across the street to another building where the school kept a lactation room. The key was so obscure that security guards often didn't know it existed. She pumped using a hands-free bra while eating lunch and video chatting with her mother in Brooklyn, who was watching her daughter.
Another story came from a legal scholar who shaped her entire life around pumping. She woke before dawn to pump, rushed to pump again upon arriving at her destination workplace, and on days when travel delays hit, she pumped on trains and buses, hidden under a scarf. She eventually realized the shame wasn't about protecting her own modesty. It was about protecting others from something she believed they didn't want to see.
A bartender found the only private space available was a disabled bathroom that also served as a coat closet and spare room. It was the only place without cameras. When she took breaks to pump, customers who had been drinking would ask where she was going and what she had to take care of. The bar business, she noted, made these moments worse.
Botz approached the project with a conceptual eye. She deliberately removed mothers and children from her photographs, choosing instead to photograph the spaces after pumping was finished. Throughout art history, breastfeeding appears as a symbol of maternal love, mostly in paintings created by men. Pumping, she believed, was a more honest reflection of parenthood in a society that prioritizes productivity over health and attachment.
The emotional core of pumping, Botz explained, centers on a biological truth. The act of expressing milk triggers oxytocin, the bonding hormone. Breast milk is an embodied communication between mother and child, its bioactive components shifting based on what the infant needs. Pumping mothers are often advised to look at photos of their babies or breathe in their scent to stimulate what is called let down. In Botz's photographs, images of babies appear on phone screens and in prints, a visual acknowledgment of how intimacy gets constrained and mediated by distance and technology.
One story emerged from an unexpected direction. A co-director of the Alabama Prison Birth Project described how her brother's girlfriend was shackled to a bed during childbirth while incarcerated. That experience sparked a mission. Now, incarcerated mothers pump every two to three hours, trying their best to maintain connection to their infants despite their circumstances. As the co-director put it, even though these mothers are behind bars, they are still doing their best to be good parents. Their mistakes don't have to define them.
Another unexpected connection came from a dairy farmer who, after giving birth, developed deeper compassion for the animals she raised. Her farm uses a method that keeps calves with their mothers, a practice she adopted after one woman on the farm refused to separate newborns after her own birth. The cows raised this way are healthier and happier. The farmer expressed gratitude for her tractor cab with air conditioning, which prevented field dust from contaminating her pump parts.
Botz's project began as a way to expand understanding of what it means to be a woman in public space. But as she completed the work, the context shifted. Women in America are no longer guaranteed bodily autonomy. Pregnancy-related deaths are rising as maternal health funding shrinks. The Surgeon General has warned that parental stress has become a significant public health crisis.
The lactation room, then, is more than a functional space. It is a symbol of a system that demands mothers be productive workers and devoted caregivers simultaneously, while offering almost no structural support to make either role sustainable.
Author James Rodriguez: "A nation's lactation rooms tell you everything about what it values, and what it ignores."
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