Mother of All Myths. Aminatta Forna
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didn’t love their children much has met with stark incredulity.’1
At the time Rousseau was writing, wet-nursing – that is, sending infants away to be breastfed by a woman paid to do the job – was common, in fact standard practice. Moments after the birth, the newborn was whisked away without even being fed once by its mother, and driven miles across the city, commonly to the outskirts or the countryside to the home of a woman of lower class. There the infant would stay for at least two but often three, four, five years before returning to his parents. It would be more accurate to call wet-nursing ‘boarding out’, for nannies rarely moved into the home to share the workload with the mother and provide an alternative source of comfort. To the child, she was it. Mothers very rarely even bothered to visit their infants. Elizabeth Badinter, the French historian who has chronicled maternal practice among the French between 1700 and 1900 (a period particularly rich in sources and from which much of our information comes) gives this account: ‘Once the baby was left in the nurse’s hands the parents lost interest in his fate. The case of Mme de Talleyrand, who not once in four years asked after her son, was not unusual, except that she, unlike many others, had every possible means for doing so had she cared to: she knew how to write and her son lived with a nurse in Paris.’2
Newborns were often shipped out in their dozens in the charge of one woman. If the child survived the journey, and many did not, either because they were too weak, or because – and there are instances aplenty of this – they fell out of the cart or were crushed under the weight of others, a grim reception awaited them. Most wet-nurses were women who lived in extreme poverty, who had made the choice to care for and feed another woman’s infant for a small fee, in the meantime depriving their own child. Frequently a woman took in several infants, more than she could possibly feed even if her milk supply was good. It was also clearly in her interests to wean each child as quickly as possible to make way for the next and there are innumerable accounts of nurses forcing babies on to solid foods well before their young digestive systems could take it.
Wet-nurses cared little for their charges, for this was hired labour not a labour of love. Conditions were generally poor, children were ignored for long periods of time, left bundled in swaddling clothes, silenced with alcohol or beaten out of frustration. Many wet-nurses were desperate women or downright charlatans, whose own breasts had stopped producing milk but who borrowed babies they passed off as their own. Some of the accounts given by Shorter and others, of infants left to starve, lying side by side on urine-soaked straw mattresses, are too harrowing to bear. As one can imagine, the death rate of babies in these circumstances was phenomenal, generally around double the normal rate rising, in one area around Rouen, to 90 per cent in the eighteenth century.
Wet-nursing was practised widely throughout Europe as well as in America. In Paris in 1780, of 21,000 children born in the city that year all but 1,000 were sent away. Elizabeth Badinter observes that boarding-out began with the aristocracy in the sixteenth century, was taken up by the bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century, and a century later anyone who could afford to have someone else rear their child did so. Why? For some women, such as the wives of artisans, work had to take priority over childcare. Other women who could have looked after their own children chose not to. According to Badinter and Shorter, they simply didn’t want to. Elizabeth Badinter’s detailed account of the lives of upper-class women of the period shows them to have been interested and engaged in matters of state, the intrigues of court, and their own ‘salons’ devoted to the pursuit of intellectual and artistic matters. They failed what Shorter calls ‘the sacrifice test’, which is a golden requirement of contemporary parenting. People in those days found children irritating and time-consuming, and their mothers found they had better things to do than nurse a child. ‘Do they know, these gentle mothers who, delivered from their children devote themselves gaily to the entertainments of the city, what kind of treatment the swaddled child is getting in the meantime in the village?’ asks Rousseau.3
From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the behaviour of the women of this era towards their offspring seems extraordinary. Were these women as truly indifferent as their manner suggests? History tends to record actions and not sentiments, and the actions appear to speak for themselves. If parents had feelings for their children, they were not thought worthy of comment. There are historians who interpret the evidence more generously. Olwen Hufton, in her account of three centuries of women’s lives in Western Europe,4 maintains that a knowledge of the beliefs held about childrearing at the time is essential to understanding a custom like wet-nursing. The milk of aristocratic women was considered weak and lacking in nutrients, compared to the healthy fare which could be provided by a farmer’s wife. And the city, quite rightly, was thought to be an unhealthy, disease-ridden environment for youngsters. Women believed that they were sending their babies away for their own good. Mothers, says Hufton, did care for their children.
But there is also a great deal of evidence of maternal practice that is immensely hard to justify as springing from real concern. Elizabeth Badinter uses her considerable findings to cast doubts on maternal instinct, particularly the idea that it includes automatic love for a child on the part of a mother. Maternal love, she argues, grows out of the mother-child relationship and is an expression of free will. The enormous love most women feel for their children is nurtured and supported by the environment and social values which exist today. The responses of the women of the eighteenth century were underscored by the mores and conditions of the time. The mother-child relationship did not only fail to flourish, it barely thrived at all. Numerous women may have felt immense regret at giving up their newborns, may have preferred to keep them close by, but they were part of a culture in which it was accepted and expected that a mother give up her child for the first few years. ‘At the very least,’ writes Badinter, ‘the maternal instinct must be considered malleable, able to be shaped and molded and modified, and perhaps even subject to sudden disappearances, retreats into civilization’s shadows.’5
In the context of the period, the behaviour of women was by no means out of keeping with the norm. What passed as standard childcare practice in those days would be classified as child abuse today. ‘The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken,’ writes Lloyd de Mause in the opening pages of The History of Childhood.6 The book is subtitled ‘The Untold Story of Child Abuse’ and recounts many of the horrors to which infants have been subjected in the name of care. From birth babies were wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes and often hung up on a peg. The rationale was that it kept babies from harming themselves and made their limbs grow straight, but in reality de Mause argues it had far more to do with keeping them out of the way altogether. Red in the face from the pressure, overheated and steeped in their own urine and faeces, babies were left in this way for days. Then there was the popular method of getting babies to sleep by ‘rocking’ them, in actual fact shaking them literally insensible in the name of peace. It goes almost without saying that children (‘the Devil’s seed’) were frequently beaten and bullied, when they weren’t left alone to cry for hours or burn themselves in the open hearth while their peasant mothers worked in the fields.
The death of a child was a commonplace event and merited little in the way of mourning or even grief. Parents, including mothers, rarely bothered to attend the funeral if there was one. Infants were regarded as eminently replaceable. Michel de Montaigne, writing between 1580 and 1590, famously observed: ‘I lost two or three children during their stay with the wet nurse – not without regret, mind you, but without great vexation.’7 Madame de Sévigné, a French noblewoman who left numerous letters and other records, remarks in passing of a friend’s distress upon hearing the news of her daughter’s death: ‘She is very much upset and says that she will never again have one so pretty.’8 An observation which neatly captures the pitiful extent of a child’s worth in the eyes of even her own mother.
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