Themes of Wet Nursing Scholarship, A Second Look

Dear Readers,

Lately I have been trying to organize my thoughts about the wet-nurses I have been studying. What were their common life experiences? What have people said previously about the practice that I have been able to correct? There have been many common misconceptions about wet-nurses and their charges, which I have concisely stated here:

Wet-nurses were not fallen women. While some of the women in this study had illegitimate children, that was not always the case. Women like Emma Rock were married and had their own families when they were employed as wet-nurses.

Wet-nurses were young women with family living near them to take care of their children. Through this study, it was seen that women with illegitimate children had their families take care of their children while they went out to nurse. Nurses stayed close to their parents or siblings, so they wouldn't have to send their children out to nurse.

The wet-nurse did not pass on undesirable characteristics through their milk to the children they nursed. While this emotional argument feels tertiary to us today, it was a common argument used in medical journals to discourage women from hiring nurses. Through this study, children nursed by wet-nurses were followed to the ends of their lives, and they all prospered according to their social standing.

Wet-nurses were neutral influences within the home. Most studies argue that wet-nurses treated their charges poorly and did not take their jobs seriously. In this study, none of the children that the wet-nurses were nursing died while in their care, which suggests that the mortality rates of wet-nurses’ charges is somewhat flawed.