The Shadow of the Second Mother

Nurses and nannies in theories of infant development

Prophecy Coles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415637213
• eBook ISBN: 9781317578352
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Shadow of the "Second Mother" explores why has there been such little interest, in psychology, social history and biography, in the important contribution that 'second mothers', such as wet nurses and nannies, have had upon the emotional life of the children they have nursed. For the last three thousand years and throughout most civilisations they have nurtured the children of the privileged, and kept alive the abandoned and unwanted child, and yet there has been a profound silence surrounding the influence they may have had.

The author explores the lives of several well-known people who have been wet nursed, such as Michelangelo, Rousseau, Jack London, Nabokov and Klein. She speculates that they all were affected emotionally by their 'second mother', and concludes that a universal feature of such delegated mothering seems to be that the bond between mother and child is broken, and the child may be left with a life-long distrust of close relationships. In The Shadow of the "Second Mother", Coles combines an exploration of attachment theory with neurology, making it possible to give an explanation as to why these important figures have lain unnamed and ignored in our social and psychological consciousness.

This intriguing new approach to an ancient practice will be fascinating reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, sociologist and students of social history.

Chapter 1 A brief history of the wet nurse of the privileged ¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315739892-2

In 1994, the journalist Guiletta Ascoli interviewed 21 Italian men and women about their memories of their balie. Ascoli’s reason for this project was that she lost her own nursemaid when she was six, at the birth of her sister. The loss of her beloved balia left her with a feeling of irreparable pain. The question she then went on to ask was, why did aristocratic and middle-class mothers, like her own, who had no professional employment, hand over their children to wet nurses? Another important question she asked was, what suffering did it cause the wet nurses who had to leave their own babies? There are several points raised by Ascoli’s work that will reappear throughout this book. Her work is a striking reminder that wet nursing was still a popular method of feeding infants among the upper classes in parts of Europe and the US up to the beginning of the twentieth century. She brings to our attention that such a method of child-rearing caused great psychological hardship to the infant when the wet nurse left, though this has been largely ignored throughout the centuries. She also draws attention to the fact that wet nursing was especially cruel to the wet nurse, for she was expected to leave her own child and love the child of the rich more than her own. ²

A brief historical survey of wet nursing shows, as in Fildes’ quotation in the chapter title, that it is the oldest profession for women and that it reaches back at least 3000 years. One of the earliest recorded civil contracts was concerned with the employment of a wet nurse in Babylon (c. 1720–1686 BC). It stated that:

When a man gives his son to a nurse and that son has died in the hand of the nurse, if the nurse has then made a contract for another son without the knowledge of the father and mother, they shall prove it against her and they shall cut off her breast because she has made a contract for another son without the knowledge of his father and mother.

(Fildes, 1988: p. 24)

Wet nursing not only stretches back into Babylonian times but it has been the preferred way of feeding royal infants and the infants of the rich in the Middle East, Mesopotamia and Europe since then. Wet nurses seem not to have been deterred by the threat that their breast might be cut off if their nursling died without proper account, and instead they have profited from selling their milk and often achieved a higher social status as a result of this profession. Some of the earliest records and paintings of wet nurses are to be found in Ancient Eygpt where the nurse was seen as a mother goddess, even though she came from ‘the harem of senior officials of the royal palace’ (Fildes, 1988: p. 3). An early painting shows Rameses II (c. 1303–1213 BC) being nursed by the goddess Hathor who is given the head of a cow because the cow was seen as the sacred animal. ³ There is also a painting of King Seti (c. 1279–1213 BC), the father of Rameses II, being nursed by the wet nurse the divine goddess Mut, the Queen of all gods. The relationship of the wet nurse to a future Pharoic King was seen to be an intimate and familial one. She was called ‘milk sister’ to the King, the infant’s father, while at the same time because of her divine status, she conferred upon her nursling his right to become the next ruler (Burdin, 2011). These royal wet nurses could call their own children ‘milk sisters’ to the King (Fildes, 1988: p. 4). So although these wet nurses were slaves in the harem, they achieved an exalted position for themselves and their children and were revered. It is hard today to get our minds around the fact that it was believed that the power of a future ruler, in early Egyptian civilisation, was bestowed by the divine status of his wet nurse. But perhaps we need to re-evaluate this ancient reverence for the lactating mother and the belief in the lifesaving quality of her milk. ⁴

The reverence the wet nurse was given rested on the practical knowledge that her milk protected the infant and enhanced its chances of survival. There was no good alternative to human milk, though drinking feeders are to be found from the earliest civilisations (Fildes, 1986). This practical knowledge that human milk was the best food to ensure the infant’s survival did not rest upon the belief that the milk necessarily had to be that of its mother. It needed to be ‘mother’s milk’ and this could be provided by anyone who had recently had a child; in other words it could be the milk of a wet nurse. ⁵

The divine status of the wet nurse gradually declined though not the efficacy of ‘mother’s milk’, nor was there a decline in the belief that wet nursing was the best way to ensure the life of a royal infant. Royal households across the world employed wet nurses for the royal infants up until the twentieth century, though the way these wet nurses were treated or thought about varied from country to country. For instance, a particular reverence was given to the wet nurses of the Spanish royal family from the twelfth century onwards. It has been suggested that the treatment of the Spanish wet nurse may have been influenced by the status wet nurses were given by the Muslim religion as it spread across Spain and influenced medieval thinking (Fildes, 1988). Mohammed was orphaned at birth (530 AD) but his life was saved by his wet nurse Halima. Unique rules concerning the relationship between the wet nurse and her nursling were then laid out in the Koran. It was believed that the wet nurse became the ‘milk mother’ of the child she fed, and this tie of milk joined her with the blood line of the whole family of the nursed child. She and her husband were seen as ‘milk-kin’ and therefore strict rules of consanguinity were drawn up. No child who had been fed by a wet nurse could marry into her family and these rules exist into the present day in Arab countries (Fildes, 1988). ⁶ Nowhere else has there been such explicit recognition of the sexual bonds that are created between the wet nurse and child, and in this recognition there is a profound insight into an aspect of the psychology of wet nursing.

In the Spanish royal families, in spite of the possible influence of the Muslim faith, such rules of consanguinity were not drawn up within the Christian faith. Nevertheless, the Spanish wet nurse was given great respect and when her work came to an end she would be given, with her husband, a property so that they could both live out their days of retirement in some economic security. ⁷ In France, the wet nurse of a royal nursling might be high born herself and would therefore already be treated with respect and be seen as equal to the royal baby in status. On the cover of Fildes’ (1988) book on wet nursing, there is a portrait of Louis XIV in the arms of his wet nurse, who is a noblewoman, Marie de Longuet de la Giraudiere. ⁸

The wet nurses of the English royal families remain more hidden and are for the most part unnamed in biographies. The three Tudor babies of Henry VIII, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward VI, all had wet nurses, and though the search for a good wet nurse was undoubtledly of prime consideration, the wet nurses disappear anonymously into the nursery household where they might live alongside the head nurse, the rocker and an under nurse (Castor, 2010). ⁹ Queen Victoria used wet nurses for all her nine children but only two wet nurses have a name, and this was because of the notoriety of one, not because of the intrinsic value that was placed upon her. Queen Victoria employed Mary Ann Brough as a wet nurse for the Prince of Wales in 1841. Brough’s husband worked on the estate of Osborne and she had had six children when she was taken into the royal household. Whether she fed any of Victoria’s five children who followed is not clear. However, when Prince Leopold was born in 1853, he was sickly, with haemophilia it was later discovered, and his first wet nurse, Mrs MacIntosh, was dismissed as he was not thriving. Brough was brought back and fed him for a year. Why we know her name is that there was a notorious scandal about her when she left the royal household in 1854. She murdered her six children, because, it was said, her husband wanted to divorce her and take them away. She was deemed to be mad and was imprisoned for the rest of her life. Queen Victoria was disturbed by this event and the possible influence Brough might have had upon her children. For instance it was well known that she had a difficult relationship with her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, who had been fed by Brough. She thought Bertie was stupid and slow. Did she fear that these characteristics were due to the influence that Brough’s milk had had upon him? (Longford, 1964; www.murderpedia.org). ¹⁰

It can be seen that the practice of using wet nurses for English royal children was still flourishing into the late nineteenth century, but we do not know whether these wet nurses were pensioned off into more comfortable circumstances when they retired, as in Spain. Whatever was the lot of these royal wet nurses, Fildes suggests that the practice of employing wet nurses for royal children arose partly from custom and partly from ritual. But in view of the fact that we seldom learn the names of these women, or have records of what happened to them, it would seem that behind the custom and ritual of wet nursing, there may have been a social belief that all things surrounding the royal breast needed to be hidden and kept in shape.

The belief in the efficacy of wet nursing spread to the aristocratic and rich middle classes in most societies from the period of Classical Greece until the late eighteenth century (Fildes, 1988). ¹¹ A nice example in Greece concerns the employment of a wet nurse for Plutarch’s (46–120 AD) daughter Timoxena. This wet nurse would have been a slave, although it is clear she was much loved and respected. Timoxena died when she was two and Plutarch, who was abroad at the time, wrote his wife a heartbreaking letter. He remembers the relationship his daughter had with her wet nurse.

She used to encourage her wet-nurse to offer and present her breast not only to other babies, but also to her favourite playthings and toys: she was unselfishly trying to share the good things she had and the things she most enjoyed with her favourites, as if they were guests at her very own table.

(Plutarch, 2008: p. 2)

This delightful picture of the wet nurse who seems to be part of a large and loving family is also found in the literature of Homeric Greece. Odysseus’ wet nurse is still living in his home when he returns from his 20-year voyage, and she recognises him before his wife, Penelope (Homer, 1946). Orestes’ wet nurse is part of Clytemnestra’s household and makes a brief appearance, weeping, as she imagines Orestes, ‘my heart’s care’, might be dead (Aeschylus, 1928: l. 742). ¹² In such households the wet nurse would be given a high status and would supervise the other servants, and if her nursling was a girl, the wet nurse might accompany her into her new home when the girl married (Fildes, 1988).

By the time of the Roman Empire (300 BC–400 AD), the picture of the wet nurse shifts slightly. She was, like the Greek wet nurses, a slave and would be part of a Roman household in which wealthy Roman women seldom fed their own babies. The wet nurse, when she had given birth, often to her master’s child, would be expected to hand her own child over to another wet nurse, while her milk was sold to a Roman family at a higher price. In other words there was a trade in the milk of wet nurses within some Roman families. Alternatively she might be expected to feed an abandoned infant whom her master had bought at the lactaria in the local town. ¹³ This method of buying an unwanted baby was a cheap way in which a rich Roman could expand his household of slaves. These Roman wet nurses seemed no more than a milk commodity, though they would have a higher status than other slaves and might on occasions be able to gain their freedom. This cultural disregard for the wet nurse seems to have spread over the centuries and was to be found in Renaissance Italy. In Florence she might be a Tartar slave and have the status of a commodity that all rich Florentines needed to possess. At the same time she might be used to serve the sexual needs of her master, and possibly his unmarried sons. She might also be loaned out to friends where she would be used for ‘nursing their newborn children’. In the case of her own child, it would be sent to the local foundling hospital (Klapisch-Zuber, 1987: pp. 140–1).

One of the difficulties that one confronts when reading about the history of wet-nursing is to know how extensive it was. Fildes neither claims that wet nursing was ubiquitous among the rich, nor does she deny its existence. Instead she writes that ‘many wealthy and noble families employed wet nurses to feed their children whilst in poorer families the mother nursed her own child’ (1988: p. 34). She nevertheless qualified her account with the comment that there were fluctuating patterns of wet nursing from the Middle Ages until the late nineteenth century. For instance, in Renaissance Florence most Florentine babies were sent out to wet nurses; and a similar pattern was to be found across France, even into the nineteenth century, where wet nursing was used not only by the rich but by the artisans working in shops and factories. ¹⁴ The belief that wet nursing was extensive especially within the families of the aristocratic and middle-class families in Europe was endorsed by deMause (1976) who wrote, ‘the average child of wealthy parents spent his earliest years in the home ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontmatter
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A brief history of the wet nurse of the privileged
• 2 The foundling and the wet nurse
• 3 The second mother
• 4 The wet nurse in literature and biography
• 5 Freud and Klein
• 6 The nanny
• 7 Trauma, attachment and melancholia
• 8 Natural bonds
• Index