Wet Nursing - I didn't realise it had such a sad history.

[CuppaTeaJanice]

I'd always imagined wet nurses to be some sort of matronly, bosomy, super-lactating women, merrily feeding aristocratic babies for years and years while their own children were at school.

I didn't realise they were largely from workhouses and had either lost their own babies or were so desperate that they abandoned their own, usually illegitimate children or left them in the charge of the workhouse, and many of these children then died.

Interesting article about it here

some of the stuff in that article, like the mothers allegedly enrolling their babies in multiple burial clubs, sounds like Daily Mail-esque moral panic.

Very interesting and so sad.

I like the sound of SGO.

It was always the case though. Before Victorian time, wet nursing was seen as a superior professional, with wet nurses taking home more money than their husbands. Wet nurses used by the upper classes were expected to be chaste and moral to be married but abstain from sex while wet nursing. One wet nurse could well go on to feeding all the babies of one family and would be very well looked after, and also encouraged to feed her own child along side.
I agree in Victorian times it was a very sad business

I don't really understand how the burial societies worked - does anybody know?

Sorry that should be "wasn't always the case".

Burial societies were like mutual societies to help pauy for funeral expenses for members and their next of kin.
Basically the wet nurses who abandoned their children would be members of several and claim funeral expenses several times over when their own children succumbed to malnutrition

So presumably they signed up when the child was still alive? How horrible that child mortality was so common that such a thing was necessary. And how desperate these women must have been to consider abandoning their own children for a job feeding someone elses.

It's unthinkable now, really, in this country anyway. And not that long ago, just over 100 years. Makes you glad we live in the 21st century.

Yes, I think before Victorian times it was quite different. The Politics of Breastfeeding talks about how it used to be a highly regarded profession, with wet nurses being respectable married women who often took their wet-nursling to live in their own home.

I feel a bit :( for Queen Victoria's babies. She was also the reason that prams became popular rather than carrying babies IIRC.

Angel - yes I read PoB as well :)

Good, isn't it? (although I'm only half way through).

I like the fact I can read it in 5 min snatches - ideal for life with a small person in the house. 13 m.o. DS enjoys it too, although mostly chewing it

The burial societies would have been a bit like life insurance policies - pay in and then get help with funeral expenses. It was very degrading to have a pauper's funeral in victorian times - mass graves and very little service. (being a pauper in itself carried a lifelong stigma) Of course religion was more popular then as well - can you imagine the pain it must have caused people thinking they hadn't been able to give their relatives an adequate send-off to get them into heaven? :(

That 'All the Pretty Little Horses' lullaby is sad when you think about it as a black slave singing to her master's baby. :(

I just read Esther Waters by George Moore. The section where she becomes a wet nurse had me in tears. I was so shocked