Wet nurses have been employed by families for centuries across many cultures. They performed an important job. The period of nursing was a time when abstinence from sex was encouraged by the church as it was said that a woman's breastmilk would become contaminated. Given that in medieval times infants were nursed for a few years - far longer than the usual practice for many in Britain today - this might be a long period of abstinence. As nursing a child can diminish a woman's fertility, a noble woman may have been expected to relinquish nursing her own child with the aim of producing as many children as possible. We should also remember that fashion played a role too in infant feeding: feeding one's own child or employing a wet nurse came in and out of fashion over the centuries.
Infants born in difficult circumstances were often put out to nurse too. It may be their birth mother had died or could not feed her child owing to illness. Parishes employed wet nurses to nurse orphaned infants and institutions like the Foundling Hospital employed many wet nurses as breastmilk was favoured over dry nursing. Breastmilk as opposed to pap was far better for infants' health. In addition, some women employed wet nurses to enable them to work outside the home, especially once industrialisation took hold.
Women may have undertaken this work if they had their own child, who had died. However, commonly wet nurses were women who were still nursing their own children. It was also the case that some wet nurses were women who had their own infant(s), then nursed another's instead of their own. For many women, it was the pay they could get as wet nurses that was the driving factor behind such employment. The image above is of the Wet Nurse Bureau in Paris.
Wet nurses were often subject to dehumanizing levels of interrogation of their character, their physical appearance, and the quality of their milk. There was even written advice on what to look for. In the 16th century Thomas Phayre argued a wet nurse should be cheerful, honest, chaste - not vicious, lazy or prone to drunkenness (Bowers, 1999). We expect many today would agree with these sentiments (perhaps not chastity): after all, who would want a drunk, dishonest, miserable carer of their child. It certainly indicates the level of suspicion directed towards wet nurses.
How did wet nurses and their families feel about their employment?
We often know more about those who employed a wet nurse than the wet nurses themselves. There is certainly a lot of advice literature which tells a story of what to look for in a wet nurse. However, it is more difficult to find stories of those who undertook the role in the past. It is all too easy to forget that these women had their own families, who may or may not have encouraged them to undertake such work. How did wet nurses negotiate their work with their families?
In 1366, a woman called Elena living in rural Yorkshire refused to nurse the infant of her former mistress as she had her own child and wished to ensure her own infant’s health first. Still feeding her own children eighteen months later, Elena was again approached to nurse the new child of her former mistress and this time agreed to do this (Leyser, 1995).
There is evidence of a male partner's point of view in the Bedford Court Rolls of 1300 in which a pauper, Nicholas le Swon, killed his wife Isabel by striking her in the back with his sword, such was his fury that she was away from home feeding a neighbour’s infant.
But husbands coerced their wives to be wet nurses too, keen to gain from the monies it accrued. In 1746, Mary Johnson’s husband prevented her from nursing her own child and insisted she wet nurse another; unfortunately, her milk dried up, such was her distress (Shepard, 2023).
What these small insights into the lives of three wet nurses tell us is that wet nursing required a great deal of emotional work on the part of those women who undertook it. They had to negotiate the work with employers: the case of Elena in 1366 shows some considerable pressure was placed upon her to nurse the child of a former mistress. The families of wet nurses also had views about them undertaking such work. Isabel le Swon's husband was so angry with her for feeding another infant that he killed her. However, Mary Johnson's husband (some centuries later) was more positive about the work. He wanted her to prioritise the money to be gained through employment as a wet nurse over feeding her own child. It clearly caused her great distress. There must be thousands of such stories but of course most will not be so tragic as the case of Isabel le Swon.
References
Bowers, Rick (ed) (1999)Thomas Phayre and the Boke of Chyldren, (Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), p. 140.
Leyser, Henrietta (1995) Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England 450-1500 (London, 1995), p. 136.
Bedford Coroner Court Rolls 1300-1305, available online from The Ohio State University, www.osu.edu, accessed 29 October, 2022.
Shepard, Alex (2023) Who Cared? Looking After Children in Eighteenth-Century London, Centre for Early Modern Studies, University of Exeter, Joyce Youings Memorial Lecture, 6 December 2023.
Image credits
Wikimedia Commons, Charles Brocas (1822)The bureau of wet nurses in Paris - wet nurses waiting to be selected, (Wellcome Collection) https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0015043.html
Wikimedia Commons: Wet Nurse with a Child, by Niko Pirosmani (1905) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wet_Nurse_with_a_Child_by_Niko_Pirosmani.jpg
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