04/03/2026
I just finished reading 'Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present' by Valerie Fildes, published in 1988. It does exactly as the title suggests, and it's fascinating. I thought I already knew a lot about wet nursing in the past, but I've learned so much. One of the big take aways for me was how complicated & controversial an issue infant feeding has always been. It's easy to assume that women only stopped breastfeeding in big numbers when formula became widely available - there's truth in this - but the reality is much more complex.
Since ancient times, how babies were fed was influenced by social class, economic status, social norms, patriarchal attitudes to womens' bodies and the milk they produced, religion and politics.
Particularly in Europe, wet nursing was not just practised by the aristocracy - it was in many countries entirely the norm for middle class families. For example, in Florence in the 1500's, by 2 weeks of age 80% of babies had been sent out to wet nurses in the country. The husbands made all the decisions about how the baby would be fed & by whom. There was a big emphasis on lineage - "nothing should detract from the wife's primary function of providing a sufficiently large number of infants to make sure one or more would survive to inherit."
Here's a couple of quotes from the book:
● "Women these days are too delicate or too haughty, or they do not like the inconvenience" - A 14th Century Scottish physician, Bernard of Gordon, on breastfeeding.
● "In Austria (in the 1930's), as elsewhere in Europe, wet-nursing, like prostitution, was one of two ever-available sources of income for poor young women. They could at all times earn their keep by becoming pregnant and selling their milk."
● "If Aunt Mary was feeding her own baby and Miss Lucy started crying Marse John would sn**ch her baby up by the legs and s***k him, and tell Aunt Mary to go on and nuss his baby fust." - A man describing how his aunt (a slave in Georgia) was made to nurse the slave owner's baby. Making slave women wet-nurse slave owners' babies was common practice in the Americas.
There's a wet-nursing museum in Burgundy - hope to visit some day!
