Abbie Black and Dr. Amy Harris, History
Introduction
Wet-nursing, or the occupation of a woman breast-feeding another woman’s child for money, was a common practice in England for most of the country’s history. Today, the practice is much less wide-spread and has a negative stigma attached. Since the mid-eighteenth century, there have been countless critical writings against wet-nursing, critiquing the practice morally and medically as a respectable profession. This continued until the practice disappeared from social convention in the late-nineteenth century due to advances in synthetic feeding practices. With this surge of critical texts, recent scholarship reflects the negative rhetoric that was prevalent for the past two centuries. These writings, based in texts that were critical of the practice, rather than grounding the research in actual lives of wet-nurses and the people they served, are missing an added layer of research that can change the way wet-nursing is viewed.
Methodology
This project was started by researching the lives of wet-nurses and the lives of their employers. By searching Ancestry’s 1851 and 1861 census for women with the occupation ‘wet-nurse,’ many potential women were chosen for research for the project. Initially, eight women were chosen to be researched; after this project, over 450 names of individuals relating to these women have been recorded, including their families and employers families for multiple generations. This information was found through many different types of documents available online and in archives, including census records, civil registration, county histories, probate documents, and newspaper articles.
This project was conducted concurrently with family history source classes that were taken, which helped base the research in British research methodology. Women are sometimes very difficult to research, due to the fact that they change their names and are not always recorded in English documents. As the research was started with one individual name on a census, clues from the census were needed to find more information about the individual. For example, a woman named Emma Condick was married on the 1861 census in Greenwich, Kent, living with her employer, rather than her family, which suggested that she had to be married to a man with the surname ‘Condick.’1 By using logic with genealogical tools, the histories of those eight women were found and were recorded in a genealogical source program.
Many genealogical sources, such as civil registration documents, cannot be accessed online, but need to be ordered from England, and a hard copy will be sent. Each certificate costs about £15, which can quickly become expensive when looking for birth, marriage, and death for every individual in the family group. I was able to order many civil registration documents to help prove relationships of these women, which helped build a provable genealogical case for my peers.
After research was completed on all the individuals previously chosen, the project began to evolve. I recently had the opportunity to do an internship in London, England at the Society of Genealogists. I had a week to do research at the archives in the area, including the London Metropolitan Archives and the National Archives in Kew. This project was not about researching the individuals previously discussed, but about learning the history of wet-nursing at the London Foundling Hospital. Twenty-three documents were found that discussed wet-nursing, including pamphlets, letters and correspondence, calendar books, and many other types of documents. These records ranged from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, which help add historical context to the lives of the wet-nurses previously studied.
Results
I was able to write a thirty page article that discussed the lives of the wet-nurses studied, and how they fit into the historical conversation taking place. Also written were one-hundred pages of genealogical reports concerning the wet-nurses studied, which are used to continue to research. In London, a twenty-five page research report was written outlining what documents were found and how they impact the research. Over one-hundred and fifty hours of genealogical and historical research was conducted for this project, which is reflected in the amount of writing that has been completed.
I found that the lives of wet-nurses did not fit the model that is currently being represented in scholarship. There were many assumptions made in current articles that were proved not always the case for these women. For example, wet-nurses were seen as a primarily bad influence on the home. Most studies argue that wet-nurses treated their charges poorly and did not take their jobs seriously. In this study, none of the children that the wet-nurses were nursing died while in their care, which suggests that the mortality rates of wet-nurses’ charges is flawed. Wet-nurses were also accused of passing undesirable characteristics through their milk to the children they nursed. While this emotional argument feels tertiary to us today, it was a common argument used in medical journals to discourage women from hiring nurses. Through this study, children nursed by wet-nurses were followed to the ends of their lives, and they all prospered according to their social standing. It is also suggested in articles that wet-nurses were fallen women. While some of the women in this study had illegitimate children, that was not always the case. Women like Emma Rock were married and had their own families when they were employed as wet-nurses.
Conclusion
Through this study, the lives of many nurses and employers have been brought to light and out of obscurity, showing the true nature of wet-nursing in the mid-nineteenth century. A study like this was not possible even ten years ago; now there are many indexes available for a plethora of English documents on websites such as the National Archives, FamilySearch, and Ancestry.
These women, almost lost to history, made a contribution to how wet-nursing developed in Victorian England. Although critics of wet-nursing writing in the mid-nineteenth century continued to push the practice into obscurity, each woman who nursed had a unique history that was full of human experiences that we can only imagine in our world of modernity. We cannot place their history in the hands of critics; their history should be written by those who want to know more about them as individuals.