This dissertation is a cross-cultural analysis of breastfeeding experiences in the United States and Japan. I conceptualize women's breastfeeding practice as embodied cultural experiences and constituted by historical, medical, personal and social perspectives on their lactating and nursing bodies. Breastfeeding practice is differently experienced by women as mothers and women as workers. At the same time, differences in a country's public policies and social attitudes toward breastfeeding, in general, and breastfeeding workers in particular, shape the different experiences of breastfeeding mothers and workers. Accordingly, through an analysis of public policies, medical recommendations, and personal and social attitudes toward breastfeeding, I will offer proposals to mitigate problems breastfeeding mothers face in the public sphere in the United States and Japan. In comparing the gendered public policies that have emerged from the dominant cultural ideas of motherhood and “worker-hood” in the United States and Japan, I shed light on pitfalls that stem from an optimistically liberating view of the “mother friendly workplace” in Japan and the “gender-blind professionalized body” at work in the United States.