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Full Description
An illustrated exploration of an age-old occupation, at once life-giving and freighted with contradictory ideas about women and their bodies.
The wet nurse—a woman hired to breastfeed a child not her own—is indeed attested far back in history; in fact, archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen's wet nurse. In modern Europe and the United States, wet nursing persisted into the early 20th century, when bottles and formula rendered it obsolete. At one end of the social scale, wealthy families hired wet nurses to spare mothers the necessity of nursing; at the other, foundling babies were fed by wet nurses employed by orphanages. In this book, conceived as both a social history and a feminist act of reparation, artist Barbara Zucker uncovers the forgotten—perhaps deliberately buried—occupation of wet nursing. She ranges across eras and cultures, revealing the practices surrounding wet nursing and the social attitudes toward the women who worked as wet nurses, almost always out of financial necessity. She investigates such surprising topics as traditional tests of the quality of breast milk (ranging from straightforward tasting to esoteric, almost alchemical rituals) and interspecies nursing (with the goat's teat the most common stand-in for the human breast). Zucker's lively text is abundantly illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs she has teased from the archives, as well as her own arresting drawings and sculptures inspired by the topic. The Second Oldest Profession will be essential and provocative reading for anyone interested in women's history.
Contents
5 Revered and Reviled
11 Hathor and the Ancient Past
17 Lactating Fountains and Paintings
35 The Wet Nurse in Europe, America and Beyond
53 Testing, Testing, Squirt and Sip
63 Strange Beliefs
69 Why Did the Wet Nurse Nurse?
75 Milk Would Flow
81 More About Hiring Practices
85 What Happened to the Babies?
89 Separating the Milk From the Breast
95 A Past Connection
99 Infant Mortality, Infanticide, and Abandonment
109 Infant Feeding and Weaning
113 Interspecies Nursing
125 Searching
137 The Breast
149 Food for Thought
159 Acknowledgments
161 Afterword
162 Plates
166 Works Cited & Consulted
168 Notes
