Hey researchers!
An article that I’ve recently read is “From Wet Nurse Directory to Milk Bank: The Delivery of Human Milk in Boston, 1909 – 1927”. This article covers how, from the 1850’s to the early 1900’s, the employment rates of wet nurses in the United States radically dropped until wet nurse employment became “relatively uncommon”. The commercial activity of “bottle feeding” became popular in its place. Yet nutritionally speaking, breast milk proved to not be a wholly substitutable product. Golden explores how Denny and Talbot responded to the concomitant difficulty of obtaining breast milk for infants, who couldn’t survive on formula or cow milk, by envisioning divergent plans revolving around the “necessity of making new arrangements for obtaining” breast milk. This necessity stemmed from the difficulty of regulating wet nurses’ agency, “the moral and medical” doubts that emerged from employing “single mothers”, and the time-taxing process of finding and then soliciting them. While Denny innovatively sought an efficient means of constructing and enabling pathways between needy infants and breastmilk, Talbot attempted to improve the system of procuring, educating, and monitoring wet nurses.
A particular detail in Golden’s article interesting me from a rhetorical point of view; it centers on the Massachusetts Infant Asylum (MIA) which opened in 1868; it was a charitable, “private institution employing wet nurses to suckle ailing foundlings”, and bore a “nineteenth-century model of moral reform”. Extrapolating from the MIA, Golden argues that “the ‘empiric art’ of infant feeding had not yet become a science, and that wet nurses remained a valuable weapon in the medical arsenal (592). My interest pivots around the point of empiric art, as opposed to science; it seems to signify a traditional practice that has been observably effective enough, at least, at what it does; the aesthetic, artistic dimension of wet nursing apparently hinges upon the practice being traditional, inefficient rather than fully modernized. Modernization here apparently entails the divorce between wet nurse labor and wet nurses themselves. Additionally, Golden uses MIA’s benevolent attitude towards wet nurses as a point of departure to emphasize their genuine relevance to the conversation of maintaining steady breastmilk supplies. However, Golden does not account for the reification dimensions of wet nurses’ bodies that the diction of weapons and “arsenal” would imply. Golden’ use of such diction probably just stems from her need to underscore how scientific progress had not yet outdated the wet nursing practice.
I wonder how I can use this example of a distinction between scientific and aesthetics notions of the female body for my research project. I am thinking of pursuing a comparative study of breastfeeding, wet nursing, and milk banking between the US, or continental Europe, and Brazil. This article has surely introduced me to the moral and ethical qualms surrounding the relationships around the collection and production of milk. Previous to reading Golden’s article I had been reading, and am currently returning to, “The Color of Modernity”, which covers 20th century Brazilian history, political upheaval and memories about gendered and racialized others’ participation in the dominant discourses of democracy. I had also been reading “Pretty Modern”, which is about the intersection between popular culture, and social and racial hierarchies, as it influences increasingly popular notions of health.