Wet nursing is an ancient practice, common to many societies. It has been linked to social class, where monarchies, the
aristocracy,
nobility, or upper classes had their children wet-nursed for the benefit of the child's health, and sometimes in the hope of becoming pregnant again quickly. Exclusive breastfeeding inhibits
ovulation in some women (
lactational amenorrhea). Poor women, especially those who suffered the
stigma of giving birth to an
illegitimate child, sometimes had to give their baby up temporarily to a wet nurse, or permanently to another family. The woman herself might in turn become wet nurse to a wealthier family, while using part of her wages to pay her own child's wet nurse. In pre-modern times, it was incorrectly believed that wet nurses could pass on personality traits to infants, such as
acquired characteristics.
Mythology Many cultures feature stories, historical or mythological, involving superhuman, supernatural, human, and in some instances,
animal wet nurses. The Bible refers to
Deborah, a nurse to
Rebekah, wife of Isaac and mother of
Jacob (Israel) and
Esau. In
Greek mythology,
Eurycleia is the wet nurse of
Odysseus. In
Roman mythology,
Caieta was the wet nurse of
Aeneas. In
Burmese mythology,
Myaukhpet Shinma is the
nat (spirit) representation of the wet nurse of King
Tabinshwehti. In
Hawaiian mythology,
Nuakea is a beneficent goddess of lactation; her name became the title for a royal wet nurse, according to
David Malo. The importance of the wet nurse to
ancient Roman culture is indicated by the
founding myth of
Romulus and Remus, who were
abandoned as infants but nursed by the
she-wolf, as portrayed in the
Capitoline Wolf bronze sculpture. The goddess
Rumina was
invoked among other
birth and child development deities to promote the flow of breast milk.
Ancient Rome (akin to a gravestone) erected by Roman citizen Lucius Nutrius Gallus in the 2nd half of the 1st century AD for himself, his wet nurse, and other members of his family and household In
ancient Rome,
well-to-do households would have had wet nurses (
Latin , singular ) among their
slaves and freedwomen, but some
Roman women were wet nurses by profession, and the
Digest of
Roman law even refers to a wage dispute for wet-nursing services (). The landmark known as the
Columna Lactaria ("Milk Column") may have been a place where wet nurses could be hired. It was considered admirable for
upperclass women to
breastfeed their own children, but unusual and old-fashioned in the
Imperial era. Even women of the working classes or slaves might have their babies nursed, and the Roman-era Greek gynecologist
Soranus offers detailed advice on how to choose a wet nurse. Inscriptions such as
religious dedications and
epitaphs indicate that a would be proud of her profession. One even records a , a male "milk nurse" who presumably used a bottle.
Greek nurses were preferred, and the Romans believed that a baby who had a Greek could
imbibe the language and grow up speaking Greek as fluently as Latin.
India By the 1500s, a wealthy mother who did not use a wet nurse was worthy of remark in India. The child was not "put out" of the household; rather, the wet nurse was included within it. The imperial wet nurses of the
Mughal court were given honours in the Turco-Mongol tradition.
United Kingdom , formerly Duchess of Suffolk, and her later husband
Richard Bertie, are forced into exile, taking their baby and wet nurse. Wet nursing used to be commonplace in the United Kingdom.
Working-class women both provided and received wet-nursing services. Taking care of babies was a well-paid, respectable, and popular job for many working-class women. In the 18th century, a woman would earn more money as a wet nurse than an average man could as a labourer. Up until the 19th century, most wet-nursed infants were sent far from their families to live with their new caregiver for up to the first three years of their life. As many as 80% of wet-nursed babies who lived like this died during infancy. There were two types of wet nurses by this time: those on
poor relief, who struggled to provide sufficiently for themselves or their charges, and the professionals, who were well paid and respected. Upper-class women tended to hire wet nurses to work within their own homes, as part of a large household of servants. Wet nurses also worked at
foundling hospitals, establishments for
abandoned children. Their own children would likely be sent away, normally brought up by the bottle rather than being breastfed. Valerie Fildes, author of
Breasts, Bottle and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding, argues that "In effect, wealthy parents frequently 'bought' the life of their infant for the life of another." Wet nursing decreased in popularity during the mid-19th century, as medical journalists wrote about its previously undocumented dangers. Fildes argued that "Britain has been lumped together with the rest of Europe in any discussion of the qualities, terms of employment and conditions of the wet nurse, and particularly the abuses of which she was supposedly guilty." C. H. F. Routh, a medical journalist writing in the late 1850s, listed the evils of wet nursing, such as the abandonment of the wet nurses' own children, higher infant mortality, and an increased physical and moral risk to a nursed child. While this argument was not founded in any sort of proof, the emotional arguments of medical researchers, coupled with the protests of other critics, slowly increased public knowledge; the practice declined, replaced by maternal breastfeeding and bottle-feeding.
France Wet-nursing was reported in France in the time of
Louis XIV, the mid-17th century. By the 18th century, approximately 90% of infants were wet-nursed, mostly sent away to live with their wet nurses. In Paris, only 1,000 of the 21,000 babies born in 1780 were nursed by their own mothers. The high demand for wet nurses coincided with the low wages and high rent prices of this era, which forced many women to have to work soon after childbirth. In 1874, the French government introduced a law named after , which "mandated that every infant placed with a paid guardian outside the parents' home be registered with the state so that the French government is able to monitor how many children are placed with wet nurses and how many wet-nursed children have died". The Vaugirard hospital in Paris began to use mercury as a treatment; however, it could not be safely administered to infants.
United States British colonists brought the practice of wet-nursing with them to North America. Workers in the 1900s demanded work contracts to provide stable wages. Wet nursing work was rarely consistent, wet nurses were stereotypically poor ladies from rural areas who offered their services for fees. The best source of evidence is found in the "
help wanted" ads of newspapers, through complaints about wet nurses in magazines, and through medical journals that acted as employment agencies. (Sometimes both babies would be fathered by the same man, the slave-owner; see
Children of the plantation.) Visual representations of wet-nursing practices in enslaved communities are most prevalent in representations of the
Mammy archetype caricature. Images such as the one in this section represent both a historically accurate practice of enslaved black women wet-nursing their owner's white children, as well as sometimes an exaggerated racist caricaturization of a stereotype of a "Mammy" character.
Egypt From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, and especially after
World War I, thousands of
Slovene peasant women migrated via
Trieste to the cosmopolitan port city of
Alexandria. There, these '''' undertook various sorts of domestic work for elite Levantine households—"the highly mobile upper strata of Ottoman millets, Jewish, Maronites, Melkite active in international commerce". Enough served as wet nurses that this occupation became almost synonymous with Slovene domestic workers, which resulted in some stigma back home. Married women could leave Alexandria and return to their home village, where they would conceive and bear a child and leave the infant to the care of relatives or a hired wet nurse, while they returned to Egypt to seek new employment and a new charge to nurse. This constitutes the origin of the archetype of the as a wet nurse, which came to overpower any other representation of the , despite the fact that empirical evidence demonstrates that only a tiny fraction of at any time worked as wet nurses. The majority of were working as nannies or chamber maids, they were not breastfeeding the children they were taking care of. The emphasis on lactaction, which marks the hypersexualization of the , was part of the rhetorical stigma surrounding this phenomenon in Slovenia. Before the late 19th century, white women's breasts were believed to produce poor-quality milk. Black women, despite being considered inherently immoral and in poor health, were believed to produce large amounts of high-quality milk due to their "
sanguine nature". The services of wet nurses were advertised in newspapers. Enslaved wet nurses were often advertised as being skilled domestic laborers with other abilities, such as cooking and laundry, to increase their appeal. One concern was the spread of
syphilis, as enslavers would hide the syphilitic nature of their enslaved wet nurses to protect their financial interests. Some medical professionals and hygienists raised concerns over the practice of forced separation of an enslaved mother and her biological child on the quality of her milk and her ability to care for babies. Her milk was not just believed to be less nutritious but actively poisonous and even deadly to the infant that she was breastfeeding. Wet nurses were also hired by or rented out to
rodas dos expotos in order to keep orphaned and abandoned infants alive. ==Relationships==