The public health maxim "breast is best," touted by organizations such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization, has become a popular adage. But debates about the merits of maternal breastfeeding compared to other methods of infant feeding abound—and they have for centuries. 

 The supposedly unnatural dangers of one such alternative feeding method, wet nursing, have been used as justification for maternal breastfeeding as the preferable and safer method, which better aligned with notions of femininity and motherhood. Similar logic pervaded English beliefs that mothers’ active imaginations could cause monstrous or unnatural births and also perpetuated a growing disdain for wet nursing over the course of the 18th century. While fears about wet nurses were not new in the 18th century, medical men renewed these old fears in their publications that warned readers that nurses would transmit their undesirable qualities to infants through breastfeeding. 

 Eighteenth-century prescriptive literature gives the impression that wet nursing was widely condemned, but women’s lived experiences with motherhood and lactation indicate no clear divide between maternal and wet nursing. Not many early modern women left detailed written accounts of their experiences with breastfeeding and wet nursing, but surviving print sources, like midwifery manuals, and objects, like nipple shields, offer a fuller picture of these embodied experiences and highlight the complexity, messiness, and pain of breastfeeding. 

“[W]omen’s lived experiences with motherhood and lactation indicate no clear divide between maternal and wet nursing.”

 Historians of medicine, literary scholars, and social historians have taken a few different approaches to the history of breastfeeding, but they tend to neglect the objects associated with breastfeeding, such as nipple shields and breast glasses. Valerie Fildes writes that early modern people believed wet nurses could reproduce themselves through breastfeeding, or what she refers to as exterior gestation. More recently, Marissa Rhodes argues that historian Kathleen Brown’s concept of body work, or cleaning and caring labor, should also include wet nursing. 

 While William Cadogan’s 1748 treatise “An Essay upon Nursing” is an important text that signaled the decline of the popularity of wet nursing in England and its North American and Caribbean colonies, these debates date back to at least the 17th century. Authors of prescriptive literature published in the 16th and 17th centuries warned that wet nurses’ bodies could disrupt familial ties through monstrous gestation outside the womb. Barber surgeon and physicians Ambroise Pare and Nicholas Culpeper, respectively, as well as midwife Jane Sharp claimed that women who employed wet nurses were vain because they did not want nursing to alter the appearance of their breasts or get in the way of their social activities. They accused these mothers of loving neither their children nor God sufficiently. Much like pregnant women with active imaginations, the bodies of wet nurses and the sustenance they provided could supposedly shape infants in unnatural or deviant ways. The mind of a wet nurse might not cause her nursling to sprout cloven hooves, but it could transform the child in unnatural ways through her tainted breast milk, thereby alienating the child from their family of origin.

Concerns about the monstrous dangers of wet nursing became more apparent in the 18th century. Prescriptive literature often used similar language to both describe monstrous births and denounce wet nursing due to fears that wealthy children would acquire mannerisms, and perhaps even physical characteristics, from their wet nurses that were beneath their social class. The 1739 edition of “The Ladies Physical Directory,” for example, noted that parents often complained that their children did not resemble them, so the author reminded readers to consider that perhaps “they might easily trace their ill-turn’d Thoughts, inordinate Desires, vicious Inclinations, and evil Passions of Mind, to the Nurses who gave them suck.” While the author clarified that he did not believe that the nurse’s milk alone could alter the mind of a child, he argued that either the milk or its combination with the mannerisms of the nurse could negatively affect the child. To encourage his readers to nurse their own children, he promoted his “Healing Balsam” as both a treatment and a preventive for nipple pain. In his estimation, nipple pain was the primary physical barrier to breastfeeding, and a mere inconvenience at that. This literature depicts a stark divide between good mothers who breastfed their own children and bad mothers who delegated childcare to domestic servants, but this was not representative of women’s lived experiences, where such a divide was far more nuanced.

Not all available publications in Britain or the American colonies outright condemned wet nursing precisely because mothers’ lives were often more complex than some medical men might have had their readers believe. Philadelphia Quaker Elizabeth Drinker owned a copy of Scottish physician William Buchan’s treatise “Domestic Medicine,” which was first published in Edinburgh in 1769 and then in Philadelphia in 1771. Buchan advised that infants should be breastfed because “[t]he mother’s milk, or that of a healthy nurse, is unquestionably the best food for an infant.” He did not take issue with mothers employing wet nurses in some cases because another woman’s breast milk was far preferable to dry nursing or feeding infants gruel instead of milk. According to Buchan, mothers with inadequate milk supplies or general poor health could even improve the health of their infants by employing healthy wet nurses to correct the infants’ humoral constitutions. 

While she did not explicitly refer to Buchan’s views on breastfeeding and wet nursing in her diary, Drinker probably read about them when she consulted his manual for other medical issues. Drinker had several children, but she did not nurse all of them herself, and her diary does not indicate that she felt that wet nursing made her a bad mother. When her son Henry was less than a year old in 1771, her physician told her that he needed to either be weaned or sent out to nurse; she chose to place him with Sally Oats, who nursed him for several months. As was common practice with long-distance nursing arrangements, Drinker learned about Henry’s wellbeing and weaning progress via mail. Around a decade later, Drinker faced the same problem with insufficient milk production for her son Charles, but the nurse she hired also had trouble producing milk. While medical men might have condemned Drinker’s choice to employ a wet nurse, her diaries do not indicate that she felt that she failed as a mother. Drinker’s experiences with breastfeeding exemplify how medical recommendations in literature did not necessarily mean that readers followed those exact recommendations.

“Both women who hired wet nurses and women who worked as wet nurses were usually mothers, and any lactating woman could need supplemental breast milk or a pair of nipple shields.”

Despite the strong condemnations in literature of mothers who hired wet nurses, diaries like that of Elizabeth Drinker and material culture indicate that the lived experiences of lactating women were often more complex than simply choosing maternal breastfeeding. In the British Atlantic, there were several options available to treat issues that befell lactating breasts that might have prevented breastfeeding. Ointments, like that described in “The Ladies Physical Directory,” and devices like wax nipple caps soothed chapped nipples during pregnancy and the postpartum period. These substances were applied immediately before or after breastfeeding, while wooden and sterling silver nipple shields would have been covered with a cow’s teat and worn while breastfeeding to protect chapped or ulcerated nipples from hungry mouths and erupting teeth. Breast pumps and glasses expressed obstructed milk ducts, while plasters and surgical tools could relieve breast pain over a larger expanse of skin. Lactating women wore breast glasses under their clothing to collect leaking milk and prevent irritation from the nipples rubbing against clothing. Nipple and sucking glasses were imported from England and could be used to correct inverted nipples that were then held in place with nipple shields. The prevalence of these objects indicate that breastfeeding was not the easy, idyllic maternal experience that medical men seemed to promise their readers. Breastfeeding could be painful and difficult, and these objects augmented mothers’ bodies to ease that pain.

Both women who hired wet nurses and women who worked as wet nurses were usually mothers, and any lactating woman could need supplemental breast milk or a pair of nipple shields. Prescriptive literature written by medical men often neglects this critical nuance. However, by augmenting these published textual sources with women’s writing and material culture, we gain a more nuanced and fuller understanding of women’s lived maternal experiences and how early modern people constructed ideas about motherhood and femininity through breastfeeding. 

Image credit: A woman breast feeding her child. Stipple engraving, 1810, W.M. Craig (Wellcome Collection | Public Domain)