User:Katearb0n/Wet nurse

Article Draft
Hello peer reviewer! I have chosen to review specific parts of the Wet Nurse page, the lead and the United States section. If you look at the whole article you will see it is very extensive! Im planning to add more context in this “lead” paragraph, the “reasons” paragraphs and the “United States” section about more about roles of women working in the home, especially thinking about slavery. Still trying to figure out how much medical context i need to provide. Anything I have changed appears in bold. Both of these parts are still under construction!

Lead-
A wet nurse is a woman who breastfeeds and cares for another's child. Wet nurses could either be employed or forced to care for another woman's child. Wet nurses are employed in three common cases; if the mother dies, if she is unable to or chooses not to nurse the child herself. '''A wet nurse who was a slave oftentimes was forced to undertake a child who belonged to a slave owner. In any case, a class difference was observed between a wet nurse and their employer .''' Wet-nursed children may be known as "milk-siblings", and in some cultures, the families are linked by a special relationship of milk kinship. Wet-nursing existed in cultures around the world until the invention of reliable formula milk in the 20th century. Wet nursing was most commonly associated with high and middle class families who could afford to pay a wet nurse to live in their house .

Opposed to wet-nursing, dry-nursing is the practice of feeding a child artificially a mix of starch (such as flour) with liquid in a bottle. Historically, dry-nursing posed certain health risks that could be detrimental to an infant's health, and was only used by lower class families who could not employ a wet nurse. Dry-nursing formulas could potentially be contaminated with bacteria and pose serious health risks. It was used as a last resort for lower class families because dry-nursing did not encourage proper neonatal sucking and swallowing practices.

Reasons -
A wet nurse can help when a mother is unable or unwilling to breastfeed her baby. Before the development of infant formula in the 20th century, wet-nursing could save a baby's life.

There are many reasons why a mother is unable to produce sufficient breast milk, or in some cases to lactate at all. For example, she may have a chronic or acute illness, and either the illness itself, or the treatment for it, reduces or stops her milk. This absence of lactation may be temporary or permanent. Other physiological conditions such as nipple abnormalities and mastitis may have ceased milk flow.

'''Wet nurses could have either been paired with a child through infancy, or aided a mother if milk production did not occur immediately after birth. A mothers milk may not come in up to 5 days after childbirth, therefore wet nursing arrangements were required.''' There was a greater need for wet nurses when the rates of infant abandonment and maternal death, during and shortly after childbirth, were high. There was a concurrent availability of lactating women whose own babies had died. T'''he maternal mortality rate had increased demand for wet nurses. In the United States, during 1630-1670 the risk of a woman dying after childbirth was between 3 to 10 percent.'''

'''Lactation may also delay fertility, and was taken advantage of for many mothers who desired to increase or limit family size. A wet nurse may take off the responsibility of nursing in order for the mother’s body to quickly prepare for pregnancy again. A wet nurse could also be employed to relieve the duty of breastfeeding while a mother is recovering from birth. Large family sizes were vital in the American frontier and fertility rates remained high compared to more settled regions.'''

Some women chose not to breastfeed for social reasons. For upper-class women, breastfeeding was considered unfashionable, in the sense that it not only prevented them from being able to wear the fashionable clothing of their time, but it was also thought to ruin their figures. Working women faced other pressures to abandon breastfeeding, including from their husbands.[citation needed] Hiring a wet nurse was less expensive than having to hire someone else to help run the family business and/or take care of the family household duties in their place. Some women chose to hire wet nurses purely to escape from the confining and time-consuming chore of breastfeeding. Wet nurses have also been used when a mother cannot produce sufficient breast milk.

(General ideas:

Wet Nurses did not leave written accounts/talk about slavery in south and relation to wet nursing- womens work- use west knight article/how wet nurse children were raised/implications of social history)

Article body
- Thinking about specifically United States history- tie in more attributions to slavery and social classes that adopted wet nursing

United States
British colonists brought the practice of wet-nursing with them to North America. Since the arrangement of sending infants away to live with wet nurses was the cause of so many infant deaths, by the 19th century, Americans adopted the practice of having wet nurses live with the employers in order to nurse and care for their charges.  Living in their homes would also ensure the cleanliness standards for their child. This practice had the effect of increasing the death rate for wet nurses' own babies. Many employers would have only kept a wet nurse for a few months at a time since it was believed that the quality of a woman's breast milk would lessen over time.

'''Child-minding, different from wet-nursing, was also commonly an additional job on top of child rearing and nursery tending. Employed wet nurses were typically paid low wages and worked long hours . Workers in the 1900s demanded work contracts to provide stable wages. Wet nursing work was rarely consistent, wet nurses were stereotypically poor ladies from rural areas who offered their services for fees.'''

Since there were no official records kept pertaining to wet nurses or wet-nursed babies, historians lack the knowledge of precisely how many infants were wet-nursed and for how long, whether they lived at home or elsewhere, and how many lived or died. The best source of evidence is found in the "help wanted" ads of newspapers, through complaints about wet nurses in magazines, and through medical journals that acted as employment agencies.

Slavery
In the Southern United States before the Civil War, it was common practice for enslaved black women to be forced to be wet nurses to their owners' children. In some instances, the enslaved child and the white child would be raised together in their younger years. (Sometimes both babies would be fathered by the same man, the slave-owner; see Children of the plantation.)

'''Enslaved wet nurses were crucial to white enslaving families who weren’t able to employ a wet nurse. It is estimated in 1850 there were around 70,000 enslaved wet nurses in the South. These enslaved wet nurses had personal relationships to the white children and often spent more time with them than their own children. Because enslaved wet nurses could not afford to spent as much time mothering their own children as their enslavers, enslaved wet nurses relied on forms on communal parenting. Milk was often sacrificed from the enslaved children to instead feed the white children.'''

Enslaved women were exploited for not only their labor, but for the exploitation of their bodies to produce infants and milk. '''Harsh conditions that enslaved wet nurses faced contributed to a significant infant mortality rate. Enslaved children often faced inadequate nutrition from their mother’s inability to feed themselves. The majority of the milk produced was given to enslaving families children.'''

Visual representations of wet-nursing practices in enslaved communities are most prevalent in representations of the Mammy archetype caricature. Images such as the one in this section represent both a historically accurate practice of enslaved black women wet-nursing their owner's white children, as well as sometimes an exaggerated racist caricaturization of a stereotype of a "Mammy" character.