Sahar’s Reviews > Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding > Status Update

Slave masters were heavily involved in making decisions regarding the care of the babies, and would force Black mothers to nurse their children on a schedule that would allow them to also continue manual labour. Wet-nursing was 'a uniquely gendered form of exploitation of the highest order that compromised their motherhood'.

I think back to Hera and Juno, the divine wives whose milk was taken from them as they slept. We know that Hercules obtains immortality, that the galaxy is created and lilies flower, but what happened to Juno? To Hera? What happens afterwards?

On his famous homecoming after a decade-long absence, the first person to recognise Odysseus was his former wet nurse, Eurycleia.

Chat was this in the movie

Wet nurses tended to hold high positions in Southeast Asian cultures, too; in some Buddhist cultures in these regions, a wet nurse was a symbol of generosity, so much so that evidence shows that rulers left great wealth to their wet nurses to repay them the debt they believed they were owed.

Painted as slovenly and neglectful, wet nurses were often vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, in Europe as well as in the colonies, where enslaved women were coerced into nursing white settlers' babies. Seldom is concern towards wet nurses found in the literature. In the nineteenth century.

Wet-nursing itself can represent fragmentation as well as union. At times, the practice of women feeding babies other than their own solidifies communities and strengthens bonds. At other times, it impacts marginalised groups and the autonomy of a woman over her own body.

In the UK, there are many women who have nursed babies belonging to their friends or family and who have done so for a wide variety of reasons. But the extent to which the idea of wet-nursing has fallen out of public favour in twenty-first Britain is demonstrated by the fact that even in the midst of our own feeding struggles, it was never suggested that I might look into the milk of another woman.

The 1881 UK census was the first to classify housewives as unoccupied, an expression of the bureaucratic impact of the separation of work and motherhood. The fashioning of the family into a unit of consumption rather than production. It was brutal because working mothers could no longer juggle childcare and paid work. They were no longer free to pause work to attend to a hungry baby.

When women use substitutes for breastfeeding, they can be viewed as lazy and/or responsible for any negative health outcomes, rather than seen as making the best choices they can within their circumstances.

The idea of the 'naturalness' of breastfeeding often masks a lack of funding for mothers and support services. If it is framed as a 'natural’ and fulfilling role for women, then it is not deemed 'work' and, therefore, the burden and costs associated with breastfeeding fall on women.