The Harvard Common Press

Gale Pryor was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and moved to New York City in 1976. After receiving her degree in English literature from Cornell University, she returned to New York to work in publishing. She married and continued her publishing career with Little, Brown in Boston. Two months after the birth of her son she returned to a full-time job that required substantial travel and continued to nurse happily for eighteen months. During the same period, Pryor revised her mother Karen Pryor’s classic breastfeeding guide, Nursing Your Baby, making it relevant to the concerns and sensibilities of a new generation of mothers.
With the birth of her second son, Pryor joined Candlewick Press, a children’s-book publisher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a copywriter and editor. After breastfeeding two sons while continuing her professional pursuits, she realized that the barriers to combining nursing and working were broader and more complex than learning to use a breast pump.  She wrote the first edition of Nursing Mother, Working Mother for other women facing the same perplexing situation. In preparation for writing Nursing Mother, Working Mother, Pryor interviewed dozens of mothers over the Internet and in person.  She also studied the research of anthropologists, lactation specialists, psychologists, and sociologists.  Most importantly, perhaps, she drew on her own experience of one of a mother’s most difficult and rewarding challenges: combining breastfeeding and motherhood with a career.  Pryor continues to write and edit from her family home in Belmont, Massachusetts.
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