Wet Nursing in Europe

European Aristocracy

By the 11th century, the aristocracy and royalty of Europe used wet nurses almost exclusively. In taking the baby from the mother, they prevented her from experiencing the birth control effects of producing milk and nursing. This allowed the women to stay fertile and produce more babies. It also left them open to sexual activity with their husbands as having sex with a nursing mother was considered taboo and harmful to the health of the baby. In France, the custom was to send infants to the country for wet nursing. However, by the end of the 18th century in France, the urban poor had also begun to send their babies out of the city so that the mothers could work. In fact, in 1780, only 700 babies out of 21,000 born that year nursed from their mothers. This high demand for wet-nurses caused quality to go down and infant mortality to rise.

Wet Nursing and Bourgeois Values

Because the Netherlands didn't have a court life like other European countries, their cultural ideals tended to revolve around the bourgeois lifestyle. This included a rejection of the aristocratic advocacy of wet nursing. Instead, the Dutch promoted an ideal focused around an immaculate household centered around the nursing mother as a part of civic responsibility. In fact, Pieter de Hooch and other Dutch painters documented these values burgeoning in the 17th century. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution then introduced some of these same ideas to the rest of Europe in the 18th century. Jean Jaques Rousseau himself denounced wet nursing in favor of nursing by the mother. However, only some people in the upper middle class changed their habits, and, despite the critiques of a few political radicals and women's rights defenders, wet-nursing remained popular in England through the Victorian Era and in France until World War I.

Decline of Wet Nursing

At the beginning of the 20th century, a comprehensive study by the French government showed that wide spread wet-nursing was contributing to infant death rates. This empirical information, which coincided with the development of new technology, initiated a change towards bottle feeding. The inventions of the rubber nipple, the bottle, pasteurization, and canned milk all made this new method of feeding possible and helped seal the decline of wet-nursing.