Hey researchers!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An article that I\u2019ve recently read is \u201cFrom Wet Nurse Directory to Milk Bank: The Delivery of Human Milk in Boston, 1909 – 1927\u201d. This article covers how, from the 1850\u2019s to the early 1900\u2019s, the employment rates of wet nurses in the United States radically dropped until wet nurse employment became \u201crelatively uncommon\u201d. The commercial activity of \u201cbottle feeding\u201d 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\u2019t survive on formula or cow milk, by envisioning divergent plans revolving around the \u201cnecessity of making new arrangements for obtaining\u201d breast milk. This necessity stemmed from the difficulty of regulating wet nurses\u2019 agency, \u201cthe moral and medical\u201d doubts that emerged from employing \u201csingle mothers\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n
A particular detail in Golden\u2019s 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, \u201cprivate institution employing wet nurses to suckle ailing foundlings\u201d, and bore a \u201cnineteenth-century model of moral reform\u201d. Extrapolating from the MIA, Golden argues that \u201cthe \u2018empiric art\u2019 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\u2019s 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\u2019 bodies that the diction of weapons and \u201carsenal\u201d would imply. Golden\u2019 use of such diction probably just stems from her need to underscore how scientific progress had not yet outdated the wet nursing practice.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s article I had been reading, and am currently returning to, \u201cThe Color of Modernity\u201d, which covers 20th<\/sup> century Brazilian history, political upheaval and memories about gendered and racialized others\u2019 participation in the dominant discourses of democracy. \u00a0I had also been reading \u201cPretty Modern\u201d, which is about the intersection between popular culture, and social and racial hierarchies, as it influences increasingly popular notions of health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey researchers! An article that I\u2019ve recently read is \u201cFrom Wet Nurse Directory to Milk Bank: The Delivery of Human Milk in Boston, 1909 – 1927\u201d. This article covers how, from the 1850\u2019s to the early 1900\u2019s, the employment rates of wet nurses in the United States radically dropped until wet nurse employment became… Continue reading Reading Reflection: Writing Lucidly<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1660,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,5,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-humanities","category-trina","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1660"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3009,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2315\/revisions\/3009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/wagsfp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}