Last year, Salama Hayek made headlines when she breastfed another women’s child in Sierra Leone, having to defend her actions and even justify why she was not ‘stealing’ [!!] milk from her own daughter. Yet, wet-nursing (breastfeeding another woman’s child) has been a common historical practice. While it has made it into popular history as a behavior of the rich, who were ‘too posh’ to lactate (or as many historians have interpreted it- a need for wealthy women to have regain fertility quickly), it was in fact common practice at all social levels.
Women who needed to return to work quickly often sent their children to wet-nurse. This was particularly true of women in industrial occupations or domestic service- often resulting in babies moving from town to country for the first few years in life. Babies who were abandoned, whose mothers were unable to breastfeed, or whose mother had died were placed with wet-nurses by family members or Poor Law officials. Sometimes breastfeeding was simply a matter of convenience. In the 1740s, Catherine Peacock, the wife of an Irish farmer, left her newborn with a neighbour to wetnurse, when she had to go away from home for a couple of days. She resumed breastfeeding when she returned.
Wetnursing could also be a reasonably lucrative occupation- with some women selling their milk several times over by nursing multiple children. This could lead to the malnourishment and even death of such children, and led to wealthy families insisting that wetnurses lived in their homes. Wealthy families would also pay for ‘exclusivity’, where women were paid to exclusively wetnurse their child and part of nurse’s payment went to paying another woman to wetnurse the nurse’s child. There was also an awareness that length of time since childbirth affected quality of milk, so parents looked for women who had given birth recently to be wetnurses. Poorer women were sometimes willing to accept lower-quality milk (that is of women who had given birth some time ago) for a cheaper price. Rich families also looked for healthy women and preferred to select farmer’s wives or the wife of tradesman, who were fit and healthy, than very poor women, who may be malnourished or ill.
The complexity of this process is illustrated in the case below from 1837, which only came to light when the wetnurse’s child was abducted.
Jane Kelly, a comfortably dressed, good-looking woman, complained of the abduction of her child to the Dublin magistrates. She said she had gone to the lying-in house [where poor women gave birth] in search of a nurse for her child, a boy of 10 weeks old, whom she had with her. She there met a woman of respectable appearance, who told her she was the wife of a wealthy farmer, named O’Brien, in county Kildare, and that she came to town to look for a nurse for her infant son.
She appeared smitten with the complainant’s baby and Kelly invited her home. She stayed for a few days and convinced her to accompany her home as a wetnurse; Kelly agreed on condition that she could find a wetnurse for her son. In passing through Francis St, the country lady invited her to have a meal in an eating house, and while they ate, the lady took care of the baby. On finishing, Mrs O’Brien, still carrying the infant, went out of the room to pay the bill. Mrs Kelly waited but in vain. She then learned her friend had paid the bill and quickly got into a hackney coach and driven off at speed. It was found she went to Wicklow, not Kildare.
There is reason to believe the kidnapper is wife of a substantial yeomen, who was childless for many years to the great uneasiness of her husband, and had convinced him she was pregnant and came to the city to ‘lie in’ so she could have the access to the best medical care. He consented and she contrived to manage the imposition.
Source: Freeman’s Journal, 06 Feb 1837.
Further Reading
Valerie Fildes, Wet-nursing: a History from Antiquity to the Present, (Basil Blackwell, 1988)
Valerie Fildes, ed., Women as Mothers in Pre-industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, (Routledge, 1990).
Katie Barclay wonders what changing practices in breast-feeding say about social conceptions of hygiene, the body, personal space and the female body as a provider of ‘services’. She is a historian of marriage at the University of Warwick.
