It seems how you feed your baby has always been controversial subject. Historian Lucy Worsley give us a fascinating insight of.
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| Photo credit Musee Municipal, Macon, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library
If you enjoy the occasional daydream about living in the past, there is a one thing missing from your vision of life as a Tudor housewife or Georgian gentlewoman. Lucy Worsley says that in her own image of motherhood in the olden days she'd always assumed that woman lived near to nature ate homegrown vegetables, sewed their own underwear, and breastfed their babies. Though, she has been exploring the history of domestic life for her book and TV series. She was really surprised to discover that for centuries mothers went to extraordinary lengths to avoid breastfeeding.
Until 20th century, every woman wanted to hand her baby to a wet nurse as soon as the umbilical cord was cut. In Tudor times (15th-16th century), there was lively debate on the issue of whether mothers 'really ought' to breastfeed their own babies. But this mindset switched from 1600 onwards, when there were widespread complaints that 'bad' mothers were shirking their maternal duty. But then...
Many moms were forbidden from breastfeeding by their husbands because it inhibited the conception of the next child (breastfeed can delay ovulation). Certainly a landowner's wife who'd given birth to a girl would be expected back in the marital bed as soon as possible to provide a male heir to the family's estates.
Then there were other woman who wanted to avoid the potential problems that came with breastfeeding. A list of medical risks of nursing made in about 1700 makes pretty daunting reading; a woman might face difficulties 'when milk is too abundant, when it curdles in the breasts, when these become inflamed' it says, or she might 'suffer from an abscess or crack in the nipples'. In the days before antibiotics and creams, these conditions were genuinely dangerous.
If you were on of the new others who couldn't breastfeed, then prepare for stern words from rather officious gentlemen standing at the Puritan pulpit - religious radicals who also tried to ban Christmas. 'Sure if their breasts be dry'. wrote one of them, women 'should fast and pray together that this curse may be removed from them' .
From 1700, the change in attitude towards breastfeeding gained some momentum when, for the first time, doctors started to encourage it for a baby's health. the beautiful and influential Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Kiera Knightely in The Duchess) set a new trend after discovering her own wet nurse was often drunk and 'made the bed stink of wine'. So, startlingly for such a grand lady, she began breastfeeding her daughter herself and started a high-society craze.
Doctors showed more support fro breastfeeding in the mid 19th century when they successfully campaigned against 'baby farming'. Many poverty-stricken Victorian women would deliberately conceive in order to gain well-paid work as a wet nurse, sending her own newborn to a baby farm - a kind of orphanage where the best hope would be for adoption (a long shot in super-fertile Victorian times) and most babies suffered neglect.
Bottle-feeding became a more 'practical' alternative by the 1860 with the invention of formula and wet nursing gradually died out. Early formula milks were cow's milk, sometimes mixed with cream, water, honey or sugar in varying proportions. Formula was more 'more nutritious' and likely to avoid rickets.
Thankfully we've learnt a lot over the years about how best to care for babies, but strong views on how we feed our babies continue to cause debate. Perhaps it always will.
Lucy Worsley's book 'If walls could talk: An Intimate History of The Home' is available as series and you can watch it via You Tube here.
Words Lucy Worsley
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