Awet nurse is a woman whobreastfeeds and cares for another's child.[1] Wet nurses are employed if the mother dies, if she is unable to nurse the child herself sufficiently or chooses not to do so. Wet-nursed children may be known as "milk-siblings", and in some societies, the families are linked by a special relationship ofmilk kinship. Wet-nursing existed in societies around the world until the invention of reliableformula milk in the 20th century. The practice has made a small comeback in the 21st century.
A wet nurse can help when a mother is unable or unwilling to breastfeed her baby. Before the development ofinfant formula in the 20th century, wet-nursing could save a baby's life.
There are many reasons why a mother is unable to produce sufficient breast milk, or in some cases tolactate at all. For example, she may have a chronic or acute illness, and either the illness itself, or the treatment for it, reduces or stops her milk. This absence of lactation may be temporary or permanent.
There was a greater need for wet nurses when the rates ofinfant abandonment andmaternal death, during and shortly afterchildbirth, were high.[2][3] There was a concurrent availability of lactating women whose ownbabies had died.[4]
Some women chose not to breastfeed for social reasons. For upper-class women, breastfeeding was considered unfashionable, in the sense that it not only prevented them from being able to wear the fashionable clothing of their time, but it was also thought to ruin their figures.[5] Hiring a wet nurse was less expensive than having to hire someone else to help run the family business and/or take care of the family household duties in their place.[5] Some women chose to hire wet nurses purely to escape from the confining and time-consuming chore of breastfeeding.[6]
A woman can only act as a wet nurse if she islactating (producing milk). It was once believed that a wet nurse must have recently undergone childbirth in order to lactate. This is not necessarily the case, as regular breast stimulation canelicit lactation via aneural reflex ofprolactin production and secretion.[7] Some women have been able to establish lactation using abreast pump, in order to feed an infant.[8]
Gabrielle Palmer,[9] author ofThe Politics of Breastfeeding, states:
There is no medical reason why women should not lactate indefinitely or feed more than one child simultaneously (known as 'tandem feeding')...some women could theoretically be able to feed up to five babies.[10]
Wet nursing is an ancient practice, common to many societies. It has been linked to social class, where monarchies, thearistocracy,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 inhibitsovulation in some women (lactational amenorrhea). Poor women, especially those who suffered thestigma of giving birth to anillegitimate child, sometimes had to give their baby up temporarily to a wet nurse, or permanently to another family.[11] 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 asacquired characteristics.[12]
Many cultures feature stories, historical or mythological, involving superhuman, supernatural, human, and in some instances,animal wet nurses.
The Bible refers toDeborah, a nurse toRebekah, wife of Isaac and mother ofJacob (Israel) andEsau, who appears to have lived as a member of the household all her days. (Genesis 35:8.)Midrashic commentaries on the Torah hold that theEgyptian princessBithiah (Pharaoh's wifeAsiya in the IslamicHadith andQur'an) attempted to wet-nurseMoses, but he would take only his biological mother's milk. (Exodus 2:6–9)
InGreek mythology,Eurycleia is the wet nurse ofOdysseus. InRoman mythology,Caieta was the wet nurse ofAeneas. InBurmese mythology,Myaukhpet Shinma is thenat (spirit) representation of the wet nurse of KingTabinshwehti. InHawaiian mythology,Nuakea is a beneficent goddess of lactation;[13] her name became the title for a royal wet nurse, according toDavid Malo.[14]
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Inancient Rome,well-to-do households would have had wet nurses (Latinnutrices, singularnutrix) among theirslaves and freedwomen,[15] but someRoman women were wet nurses by profession, and theDigest ofRoman law even refers to a wage dispute for wet-nursing services (nutricia).[16] The landmark known as theColumna Lactaria ("Milk Column") may have been a place where wet nurses could be hired.[17] It was considered admirable forupperclass women tobreastfeed their own children, but unusual and old-fashioned in theImperial era.[18] Even women of the working classes or slaves might have their babies nursed,[19] and the Roman-era Greek gynecologistSoranus offers detailed advice on how to choose a wet nurse.[20] Inscriptions such asreligious dedications andepitaphs indicate that anutrix would be proud of her profession.[21] One even records anutritor lactaneus, a male "milk nurse" who presumably used a bottle.[22]Greek nurses were preferred,[23] and the Romans believed that a baby who had a Greeknutrix couldimbibe the language and grow up speaking Greek as fluently as Latin.[24]
The importance of the wet nurse toancient Roman culture is indicated by thefounding myth ofRomulus and Remus, who wereabandoned as infants but nursed by theshe-wolf, as portrayed in the famousCapitoline Wolf bronze sculpture. The goddessRumina wasinvoked among otherbirth and child development deities to promote the flow of breast milk.
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 theMughal court were given honours in the Turco-Mongol tradition.[25]
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.[26] As many as 80% of wet-nursed babies who lived like this died during infancy.[26]
During theVictorian era, women took in babies for money and nursed them themselves or fed them with whatever was cheapest. This was known asbaby-farming; poor care sometimes resulted in highinfant death rates. The wet nurse at this period was most likely a single woman who previously had given birth to an illegitimate child.[27] There were two types of wet nurses by this time: those onpoor 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 atfoundling hospitals, establishments forabandoned children. Their own children would likely be sent away, normally brought up by the bottle rather than being breastfed. Valerie Fildes, author ofBreasts, 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."[28]
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."[29] 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.[30] 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.[31]
Wet-nursing was reported in France in the time ofLouis 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.[32] In Paris, only 1,000 of the 21,000 babies born in 1780 were nursed by their own mothers.[33] 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.[26] This meant that many mothers had to send their infants away to be breastfed and cared for by wet nurses even poorer than themselves. With the high demand for wet nurses, the price to hire one increased as the standard of care decreased.[26] This led to many infant deaths. In response, rather than nursing their own children, upper-class women turned to hiring wet nurses to come live with them instead. In entering into their employer's home to care for their charges, these wet nurses had to leave their own infants to be nursed and cared for by women far worse off than themselves, and who likely lived at a relatively far distance away.
The Bureau of Wet Nurses was created in Paris in 1769 to serve two main purposes: it supplied parents with wet nurses, as well as helping lessen the neglect of babies by controlling monthly salary payments.[26] In order to become a wet nurse, women had to meet a few qualifications, including physical fitness and good moral character; they were often judged on their age, their health, the number of children they had, as well as their breast shape, breast size, breast texture, nipple shape, and nipple size, since all these aspects were believed to affect the quality of a woman's milk.[34] In 1874, the French government introduced a law named afterThéophile Roussel [fr], 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".[26]
Wet nurses were hired to work in hospitals to nurse babies who were premature, ill, or abandoned.[32] During the 18th and 19th centuries,congenital syphilis was a common cause of infant mortality.[35] The Vaugirard hospital in Paris began to use mercury as a treatment; however, it could not be safely administered to infants.[35] In 1780, it began the process of giving mercury to wet nurses, who could then transmit the treatment in their milk to infected infants.[35]
The practice of wet-nursing was still widespread during World War I, according to theAmerican Red Cross. Working-class women would leave their babies with wet nurses so they could get jobs in factories.[36]
British colonists brought the practice of wet-nursing with them to North America.[34] Since the arrangement of sending infants away to live with wet nurses was the cause of so many infant deaths, by the 19th century, Americans adopted the practice of having wet nurses live with the employers in order to nurse and care for their charges.[34] This practice had the effect of increasing the death rate for wet nurses' own babies. Many employers would have only kept a wet nurse for a few months at a time since it was believed that the quality of a woman's breast milk would lessen over time.[34]
Child-minding, different from wet-nursing, was also commonly an additional job on top of child rearing and nursery tending. Employed wet nurses were typically paid low wages and worked long hours.[37] Workers in the 1900s demanded work contracts to provide stable wages.[38] Wet nursing work was rarely consistent, wet nurses were stereotypically poor ladies from rural areas who offered their services for fees.[37]
Since there were no official records kept pertaining to wet nurses or wet-nursed babies, historians lack the knowledge of precisely how many infants were wet-nursed and for how long, whether they lived at home or elsewhere, and how many lived or died.[39] 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.[34]
In the Southern United States before theCivil War, it was common practice for enslaved black women to be forced to be wet nurses to their owners' children.[32] In some instances, the enslaved child and the white child would be raised together in their younger years.[40] (Sometimes both babies would be fathered by the same man, the slave-owner; seeChildren of the plantation.) Visual representations of wet-nursing practices in enslaved communities are most prevalent in representations of theMammy archetype caricature.[41] 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.
From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, and especially afterWorld War I, thousands ofSlovene peasant women[42] migrated viaTrieste to the cosmopolitan port city ofAlexandria.[43][44] There, thesealeksandrinke [sl] undertook various sorts of domestic work[45] for elite Levantine households—"the highly mobile upper strata of Ottoman millets, Jewish, Maronites, Melkite active in international commerce".[46] 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 thealeksandrinka as a wet nurse, which came to overpower any other representation of thealeksandrinstvo, despite the fact that empirical evidence demonstrates that only a tiny fraction ofaleksandrinke at any time worked as wet nurses. The majority ofaleksandrinke 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 thealeksandrinstvo, was part of the rhetorical stigma surrounding this phenomenon in Slovenia.[46]
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Sometimes, the infant was placed in the home of the wet nurse for several months, as was the case forJane Austen and her siblings. ThePapyrus Oxyrhynchus 91, a receipt fromAD 187, attests to the ancient nature of this practice. Sometimes, the wet nurse came to live with the infant's family, filling a position between themonthly nurse (for the immediatepost-partum period) and thenanny.
In some societies, the wet nurse was simply hired as any other employee. In others, however, she had a special relationship with the family, which could incurkinship rights. InVietnamese family structure, for example, the wet nurse is known asNhũ mẫu,mẫu meaning "mother".[47] Islam has a highly codified system ofmilk kinship known asrada.George III of the United Kingdom, born two months premature, had a wet nurse whom he so valued all his life, that her daughter was appointedlaundress to the Royal Household, "asinecure place of greatemolument".[48]
Mothers who nurse each other's babies are engaging in a reciprocal act known ascross-nursing orco-nursing.
In contemporary affluent Western societies such as the United States, the act of nursing a baby other than one's own often provokes cultural discomfort. When a mother is unable to nurse her own infant, an acceptable mediated substitute isexpressed milk (or especiallycolostrum), which is donated tomilk banks, analogous toblood banks, and processed there by being screened, pasteurized, and usually frozen.Infant formula is also widely available, which its makers claim can be a reliable source of infant nutrition when prepared properly. Dr. Rhonda Shaw notes that Western objections to wet nurses are cultural:
The exchange of body fluids between different women and children, and the exposure of intimate bodily parts make some people uncomfortable. The hidden subtext of these debates has to do with perceptions of moral decency. Societies with breast fetishes tend to conflate the sexual and erotic breast with the functional and lactating breast.[10]
For some Americans, the subject of wet-nursing is becoming increasingly open for discussion. During aUNICEFgoodwill tour to Sierra Leone in 2008, American Mexican actressSalma Hayek decided to breastfeed a local infant in front of the accompanying film crew. The sick one-week-old baby had been born the same day but a year later than Hayek's daughter, who had not yet been weaned. The actress later discussed on camera an anecdote of her Mexican great-grandmother spontaneously breastfeeding a hungry baby in a village.[49]
Wet nurses are still common in manydeveloping countries, although the practice poses a risk of infections, such as HIV.[10] In China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, a wet nurse may be employed in addition to a nanny as a mark of aristocracy, wealth, and high status. Following the2008 Chinese milk scandal, in which contaminated infant formula poisoned thousands of babies, the salaries of wet nurses there increased dramatically.[50]
Royal wet nurses are more likely than most to reach the historical record.
InAncient Egypt,Maia was the wet nurse of KingTutankhamun.[51]Sitre In, the nurse ofHatshepsut,[52] was not a member of the royal family but received the honour of a burial in the royalnecropolis in theValley of the Kings, in tombKV60. Her coffin has the inscriptionwr šdt nfrw nswt In, meaningGreat Royal Wet Nurse In.[53]
In Asia,Lady Kasuga was the wet nurse of the thirdTokugawashōgun,Iemitsu.Lu Lingxuan was alady in waiting who served as wet nurse to the emperorGao Wei. She became exceedingly powerful during his reign and was often criticized by historians for her corruption and treachery. Chinese emperors honoured theNurse empress dowager. Wet nurses were also common during theMughal period, with almost every Mughal prince having one. Some prominent ones areMaham Anga forAkbar andDai Anga forShah Jahan.Shin Myo Myat was the mother of KingBayinnaung of theToungoo dynasty ofBurma (Myanmar), and the wet nurse of KingTabinshwehti. The lastEmperor of China,Puyi, describedWang Lianshou as being the only person who was able to control him: "from my infancy until the time I grew up, only my wet nurse, because of her simple language, was able to make me grasp the idea that I was like other people."
In Europe,Hodierna of St Albans was the mother ofAlexander Neckam and wet nurse ofRichard I of England, andMrs. Pack was a wet nurse toWilliam, Duke of Gloucester (1689–1700).Geneviève Poitrine was a wet nurse of theDauphin of France,Louis Joseph, son of KingLouis XVI of France and QueenMarie Antoinette. Poitrine was accused of transmittingtuberculosis to the Dauphin and triggering his infant death when aged seven,[54] although since very few pre-adolescent children die from TB, this accusation may have been the result of a misdiagnosis.[55]
Some non-royal wet nurses have also been written about.Halimah bint Abi Dhuayb was thefoster mother and wet nurse of theIslamic prophetMuhammad.Petronella Muns was, with her employer, the first Western woman to visit Japan. Naomi Baumslag, author ofMilk, Money and Madness, described the legendary capacity ofJudith Waterford: "In 1831, on her 81st birthday, she could still produce breast milk. In her prime she unfailingly produced two quarts (four pints or 1.9 litres) of breast milk a day."[10]
Media related toWet nurses at Wikimedia Commons
