wet-nursing

wet-nursing means breastfeeding an infant that is not one's biological offspring. For infants whose mothers cannot or will not suckle them, wet-nursing offers the greatest chance for survival and thus wet-nursing practices influence infant mortality rates and consequently the demographic and economic structure of societies. Wet-nursing customs reflect social arrangements and cultural values, illustrating how individuals, families, communities, and the state respond to the needs of infants and the biological capacities of women.

There are, essentially, four types of wet-nursing arrangements. Informal wet-nursing ranges from the occasional nursing of another woman's child to a private arrangement to suckle a baby whose mother is ailing or who has died. Such practices are hard to document and quantify, but undoubtedly informal wet-nursing was historically the most widespread and most common arrangement. In these cases women may have nursed their own babies along with the suckling. A second form of unpaid wet-nursing involved the use of slave women. Slaves suckled the offspring of patrician families at the height of the Roman Empire, and they suckled the children of plantation owners in the Americas in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Commercial wet nurses received remuneration from individual employers. There are references to these arrangements in the Code of Hammurabi, in the Biblical story of Exodus (where the daughter of Pharaoh sends her slave to hire a wet nurse for the baby Moses and ends up hiring the child's own mother — so not a true instance of wet-nursing), and in the Koran, which forbade marriage among individuals described as milk-kin. Evidence of commercial wet-nursing also appears in laws and contracts, as well as in medical books, and together these sources document the extensive employment of wet nurses in Europe in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries — the heyday of the commercial wet nurse. In some cases, families sent their infants to live with wet nurses in the country — but sucklings might not survive if the wet nurses favoured their own babies. In other instances, wet nurses abandoned their own infant and went to live in the home of their employer — and it was then the wet nurses' infants who paid the highest price. As the heroine of George Moore's 1894 novel Esther Waters noted of wet nurses ‘It is our babies that die, it is life for a life.’

The fourth type of wet-nursing developed when the Church and the State employed wet nurses to suckle foundlings in institutions created for saving souls and lives. Often the women were not paid, but were themselves the recipients of charity or welfare — receiving room and board in return for their suckling of abandoned babies as well as their own offspring. Generally these arrangements failed, at least in terms of saving infant lives. The women coerced into wet-nursing had little incentive to save the lives of the sucklings they were forced to care for, and perhaps little ability to do so, given the harsh conditions under which they lived and the meagre diets they received.

The failures of congregate wet-nursing and the high cost of private commercial arrangements encouraged the search for alternatives. Artificial infant foods — most commonly milk from animals — had always been an alternative, but only in the nineteenth century did relatively safe, digestible products become widely marketed. The use of commercial infant formulae undermined the custom of wet-nursing in much of the developed world and later would lead to a decline of breast-feeding in the developing world. Other factors also played a role in this transition, among them changes in medical practice, evolving customs of infant care, the growth of non-domestic employment opportunities for women, and the recognition of the high mortality rate of the wet nurses' infants. Since the late twentieth century, infants in Western nations who have needed breast milk to survive and who could not obtain it from their mothers have received relief in the form of bottled human milk supplied by a milk bank, stocked by mothers who have had milk to spare. Wet-nursing as a form of service labour has been replaced by milk selling and/or milk donation, a transaction in which human milk has become a commodity.

Janet Golden

Bibliography

Fildes, V. (1988). Wet nursing: a history from antiquity to the present. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

See also breasts; infant feeding.