Introduction

Summary

In her autobiography, Blackberry Winter (1972), Margaret Mead recalled the impending birth of her first child. Clearly influenced by her field work in regions where neither bottles nor formulas were available, the eminent anthropologist wrote of how she promised herself that she would hire a wet nurse if she could not breast-feed her child.

Mead would have been hard pressed to hire a wet nurse in 1939, the year of her daughter's birth. Although hospitals sometimes kept women on call to provide breast milk to premature infants, wet nursing as a form of domestic service was fast becoming extinct. Women who could not or would not breast-feed their babies typically provided them with an artificial formula composed of modified cow's milk. Indeed, by the middle of the twentieth century, many American families routinely chose bottle-feeding over breast-feeding, perceiving the former to be the modern, scientific way to rear children. Mead thus was far out of step with her contemporaries. Her field work in less developed regions had taught her something most Americans preferred to forget: that human infants are most likely to survive and flourish when fed human milk.

There are only three ways to nourish an infant: with its own mother's milk, with an artificial food, or with the milk of a woman who is not its mother – a wet nurse. An obvious question is why Americans rejected wet nursing, assuming that what “science” produced was superior to what “nature” provided.