Yet shifting attitudes toward maternal breastfeeding are nothing new to American society. In fact, the eighteenth century witnessed significant transitions in both medical advice and maternal practices surrounding breastfeeding. Well into the late eighteenth century, middle- and upper-class white women in America exhibited low rates of maternal breastfeeding. Ideas about fashionability and status dictated cultural norms, leading many women of means to employ wet nurses. At the same time, lower-class women had little choice but to breastfeed their own infants, while enslaved black women were forced to nurse their owners’ infants.
Women’s access to information also shaped their attitudes towards and practices of maternal breastfeeding. For example, literate mothers were more likely to read advice books on maternity and put their recommendations into practice.
The most widespread belief among both physicians and mothers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the taboo against administering colostrum, or first milk, to newborns. Seventeenth-century midwifery books and medical advice published in Britain and sold in the American colonies deemed colostrum to be toxic to infants, and thus many mothers postponed neonatal breastfeeding. In 1671, for example, English midwife Jane Sharp wrote, “It is not good for a woman presently to suckle her child because those unclean purgations cannot make good milk, the first milk is naught.”
But depriving infants of colostrum left them without much-needed antibodies, delayed or impaired mother-child bonding and infant development, and caused breast maladies that left mothers unable to nurse. New mothers often relied on wet nurses during the initial two or three weeks postpartum while her milk came in. Family friends also volunteered to nurse newborns if a family could not afford to employ a wet nurse. As the eighteenth century progressed, doctors eventually began to retract their former advice regarding the perceived dangers of colostrum.
There were, of course, other factors that prevented mothers from suckling their own infants and led to the employment of wet nurses: disease, insufficient milk supply, breast infections or abscesses, fatigue and stress, and even maternal mortality. Thus, families may have had little choice but to resort to wet-nursing or dry-feeding by bottle to ensure their child’s survival.