Edwina Froehlich, who died Sunday at 93, was one of seven suburban Chicago women who gathered in 1956 to help spur what became a national renaissance in breast-feeding.

La Leche League International, which for years met in her suburban Franklin Park basement, now reaches mothers in 60 countries and is generally cited as the largest organization of its kind in the world. But it was founded as nothing more ambitious than a support group for mothers who wanted to suckle their babies and couldn’t find anyone to help them through difficulties.

“We all felt a mother should listen to her body, her nature,” Froehlich told the Chicago Tribune in 1996.

Hostility to breast-feeding in the 1950s may have been exaggerated in subsequent decades — a lower percentage of mothers breast-fed in the 1960s and early 1970s, according various sources — but under 30% of mothers seem to have breast-fed in 1956. (The government didn’t start keeping track until much later.) One weekend that summer, two of Froehlich’s neighbors, Mary White and Marian Tompson, sat beneath an apple tree at a church picnic, nursing their babies. A stream of young women approached them asking how and why. A week or so later, they gathered with five more friends and in-laws, including Froehlich, to form La Leche League, dedicated to spreading the word. They picked the name, Spanish for “the milk,” because of a newspaper ban on the word “breast,” Froehlich later explained. However, a quick search of 1950s newspapers shows there was no such ban, although the word “breast-feeding” was uncommon. La Leche League’s publicity materials state that its name was inspired a Florida shrine to “Nuestra Señora de la Leche y buen parto,” literally, “Our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk.” This would be fitting, as all seven of the founders were Catholic. Froehlich attended Catholic Mundelein College in Chicago and was national executive director of the Young Christian Workers organization in the mid-1940s.

The “Happy Delivery” part of the shrine’s name fit the ladies’ concerns, too, as they found they shared a dislike for the hospital delivery practices of the time, which treated pregnancy as a medical problem and often anesthetized mother in labor, delivered babies via forceps and caesarians, and kept fathers out of the delivery room. Froehlich, pregnant at the time with her third son, had all three deliveries at home after watching her older sister go through the standard hospital routine.

The newly formed league started inviting sympathetic physicians to speak, including Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, considered the father of the natural childbirth movement. When he came to speak in 1957, the meeting had to be moved from Froehlich’s house to a local school gym.

La Leche began offering a free round-the-clock telephone service so that mothers could get help with nursing any time they needed it. The Chicago Tribune’s family columnist, Joan Beck, visited in 1963 and wrote: “A long extension cord lets Mrs. Froehlich keep up with her housework while she dispenses the blend of encouragement and information the mother needs.”

The founders also put together a loose-leaf notebook full of advice that was eventually edited down to become “The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding.” Through seven editions, the book has sold over 2 million copies, La Leche says.

The group spread quickly, mainly by word of mouth. Its first international affiliate opened in 1960 in Quebec. La Leche received a big bump in publicity in 1963 when Reader’s Digest published a profile titled “They teach the art of breast-feeding.” Yet rates declined further through the 1960s before turning around after 1972. In 1981, La Leche began a formal consultative relationship with Unicef. La Leche today claims 3,000 member groups in 60 countries. The American breast-feeding rate for newborns in 2007 was 74.5%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Froehlich served in various capacities, as a trainer and group leader, and as executive secretary from 1956 until 1983. She continued to address groups, and to show consternation at women denied the right to breast-feed in public, until late in life. The founders were dedicated to processes found in nature, and nature did right by them, too. Froehlich is the first of the original seven founders to die.

Edwina Froehlich

Born Edwina Hearn on January 15, 1915, in the Bronx; died June 8 at a Chicago-area hospital after suffering a stroke; survived by her three sons, Paul, David, and Peter, and nine grandchildren.