Wet nurse
There was a greater need for wet nurses when the rates of infant abandonment and maternal death, during and shortly after childbirth, were high.
For upper-class women, breastfeeding was considered unfashionable, in the sense that it not only prevented them from being able to wear the fashionable clothing of their time, but it was also thought to ruin their figures.
This is not necessarily the case, as regular breast stimulation can elicit lactation via a neural reflex of prolactin production and secretion.
In pre-modern times, it was incorrectly believed that wet nurses could pass on personality traits to infants, such as acquired characteristics.
[12] Many cultures feature stories, historical or mythological, involving superhuman, supernatural, human, and in some instances, animal wet nurses.
The Bible refers to Deborah, a nurse to Rebekah, wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob (Israel) and Esau, who appears to have lived as a member of the household all her days.
Midrashic commentaries on the Torah hold that the Egyptian princess Bithiah (Pharaoh's wife Asiya in the Islamic Hadith and Qur'an) attempted to wet-nurse Moses, but he would take only his biological mother's milk.
In Burmese mythology, Myaukhpet Shinma is the nat (spirit) representation of the wet nurse of King Tabinshwehti.
In Hawaiian mythology, Nuakea is a beneficent goddess of lactation;[13] her name became the title for a royal wet nurse, according to David Malo.
[27] There were two types of wet nurses by this time: those on poor relief, who struggled to provide sufficiently for themselves or their charges, and the professionals, who were well paid and respected.
Upper-class women tended to hire wet nurses to work within their own homes, as part of a large household of servants.
"[28] Wet nursing decreased in popularity during the mid-19th century, as medical journalists wrote about its previously undocumented dangers.
Fildes argued that "Britain has been lumped together with the rest of Europe in any discussion of the qualities, terms of employment and conditions of the wet nurse, and particularly the abuses of which she was supposedly guilty.
[34] In 1874, the French government introduced a law named after Théophile Roussel [fr], which "mandated that every infant placed with a paid guardian outside the parents' home be registered with the state so that the French government is able to monitor how many children are placed with wet nurses and how many wet-nursed children have died".
[39] The best source of evidence is found in the "help wanted" ads of newspapers, through complaints about wet nurses in magazines, and through medical journals that acted as employment agencies.
[34] In the Southern United States before the Civil War, it was common practice for enslaved black women to be forced to be wet nurses to their owners' children.
[41] Images such as the one in this section represent both a historically accurate practice of enslaved black women wet-nursing their owner's white children, as well as sometimes an exaggerated racist caricaturization of a stereotype of a "Mammy" character.
From the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, and especially after World War I, thousands of Slovene peasant women[42] migrated via Trieste to the cosmopolitan port city of Alexandria.
[43][44] There, these aleksandrinke [sl] undertook various sorts of domestic work[45] for elite Levantine households—"the highly mobile upper strata of Ottoman millets, Jewish, Maronites, Melkite active in international commerce".
[46] Enough served as wet nurses that this occupation became almost synonymous with Slovene domestic workers, which resulted in some stigma back home.
George III of the United Kingdom, born two months premature, had a wet nurse whom he so valued all his life, that her daughter was appointed laundress to the Royal Household, "a sinecure place of great emolument".
In contemporary affluent Western societies such as the United States, the act of nursing a baby other than one's own often provokes cultural discomfort.
Dr. Rhonda Shaw notes that Western objections to wet nurses are cultural: The exchange of body fluids between different women and children, and the exposure of intimate bodily parts make some people uncomfortable.
During a UNICEF goodwill tour to Sierra Leone in 2008, American Mexican actress Salma Hayek decided to breastfeed a local infant in front of the accompanying film crew.
[10] In China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, a wet nurse may be employed in addition to a nanny as a mark of aristocracy, wealth, and high status.
Following the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, in which contaminated infant formula poisoned thousands of babies, the salaries of wet nurses there increased dramatically.
The last Emperor of China, Puyi, described Wang Lianshou as being the only person who was able to control him: "from my infancy until the time I grew up, only my wet nurse, because of her simple language, was able to make me grasp the idea that I was like other people."
In Europe, Hodierna of St Albans was the mother of Alexander Neckam and wet nurse of Richard I of England, and Mrs.
Halimah bint Abi Dhuayb was the foster mother and wet nurse of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.
