The Wet Nurse

Chapter 4 From Sanctity to Promiscuity: The Wet Nurse

When she had a child, he had to be sent out to a wet nurse. […] One day, Emma felt a sudden urge to see her baby daughter, who had been put out to nurse with the carpenter’s wife […] At the sound of the gate the wet nurse appeared, holding a nursing infant at her breast. With the other arm she was dragging along a frail little chap with sores all over his face – the son of a Rouen knitted-goods merchant whose parents, too involved with their business, had left him to board in the country. […] Emma’s baby lay sleeping in a wicker cradle on the ground. Picking her up in her blanket, she began singing softly as she rocked her. Léon was pacing about the room; he found it strange to see this fine lady in her nankeen dress in the midst of all this poverty. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 18571 ⸪

As mentioned in the previous chapter, toward the end of the eighteenth century the subject of the Caritas declined, making way for depictions of motherhood. The image of the Caritas was, however, adopted for the depiction of alternate subject matters, influencing the portrayal of the wet nurse (fig. 15). Though distinct in nature, the Caritas and the wet nurse have much in com- mon, as both figures represent mothers who suckle the children of strangers. Nonetheless, the Caritas is a symbolic figure embodying selfless giving, while the wet nurse was an actual historic figure who received monetary compensa- tion for her services. Unlike the practice of “cross-feeding” or “milk sharing,” which has become customary in recent years, in which mothers help each other out by nursing children not their own,2 wet nurses often abandoned their own children for the benefit of their work, handing them over to

1 Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8, 82–83. 2 For further information, see: Rhonda Shaw, “The Virtues of Cross-Nursing and the ‘Yuk Factor’,” Australian Feminist Studies 19, no. 45 (2004): 287–299; Shannon K. Carter and Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster, “Pure Gold for Broken Bodies: Discursive Techniques Constructing Milk Banking and Peer Milk Sharing in U.S. News,” Symbolic Interaction (2016): 1–21; Kimberley

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004376755_005 194 Chapter 4 impoverished wet nurses or feeding them breast-milk substitutes, which en- dangered their lives. It is for this reason, as well as due to the obstinate op- position of medical professionals and moralists to wet-nursing throughout the ages, that the link between the Caritas and the wet nurse is astounding; I will, however, argue in this chapter that the connection between the two is essential to our understanding of the French people’s ambivalence toward wet nurses in the nineteenth century. In the first chapter I demonstrated that maternal breast-feeding and wet- nursing were intertwined in eighteenth – and nineteenth-century France. The employment of a wet nurse, which had been customary among high-class women since the Middle Ages, became prevalent in France in eighteenth and nineteenth-century among bourgeois women, as well as among urban working-class women who earned a living, such as bakers, silk weavers, seamstress- es, and peddlers. These artisans eschewed breast-feeding, as their income was greater than the wages owed to rural wet nurses. In consequence, middle and upper-class women alone could choose whether or not to breast-feed their children. Many of them renounced maternal breast-feeding for reasons of con- venience, family planning, social engagements, or prestige. In contrast, urban working-class women often gave up breast-feeding in favor of employment outside the home, while rural women of meager means were usually forced to nurse a child not their own in order to raise the family income. Statistical records demonstrate that, in the eighteenth century, almost every rural woman who could breast-feed, meaning that she herself had recently given birth, was engaged in wet-nursing.3 Those women who employed wet nurses could be re- leased from their maternal obligations thanks to other women, who took those obligations upon themselves in order to provide for their families. It is, therefore, obvious that the wet nurses belonged to the lower classes and depended on the supplemental income. Many of them were villagers who travelled to the cities in search of work, leaving their children behind. Others lost their own child and took advantage of their lactation as a source of income, while some were unmarried women who abandoned their illegitimate children in orphan- ages and sought to economically rehabilitate themselves by nursing the children of others. Bourgeois women often favored these young women, as they were free of familial obligations and were, therefore, available for prolonged

Updegrove, “Nonprofit Human Milk Banking in the Unites States,” Journal of Midwifery and Women’s Health 58 (2013): 502–508. 3 O’Reilly, “Wet Nursing,” Ecyclopedia of Motherhood, 1271–1273; Emily E. Stevens, Thelma E. Patrick and Rita Pickler, “A History of Infant Feeding,” Journal of Perinatal Education (Spring 2009): 32–39; Michelle Perrot, “De la nourrice à l’employée: Travaux de femmes dans la France du XIXe siècle,” Le Mouvement social 105 (October–December, 1978), 3–10.