Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History of Breastfeeding

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

How has our relationship with breast milk changed through history? Why are there associations of shame with this most natural act, of us consuming humanities first food? And what does the formation of our galaxy have to do with it?Joining Kate today is Joanna Wolfarth, art historian and author of Milk: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding, to unpack all of this and more. This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. If you're enjoying Betwixt please vote for us at the British Podcast Awards here. It would mean the world to us!Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Oh, my lovely betwixters, it is me, Kate Lister. I am here once more with your fair do's warning because I just care about you. I care about your well-being. I care about your happiness. I care about your triggeredness.

Is that a word? I don't know. But we have to do this bit for legal, slightly confusing reasons. I have to tell you that this isn't a nice. adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults in an adulty way about a range of adult things and you should be an adult too now that we're all feeling safer thank you so much for swinging by again i do like having these conversations with you i suppose they're even better if we're all on the same page and you know

that absolute smut and unwieldy adult content is going to be heading your way very soon and if you continue to listen to us again quite frankly that really it's all on you you can't even get offended because, you know, fair do's, we did tell you. Quiet betwixters. We are in Juno's sleeping quarters. Back in the world of Roman mythology. There she is, the goddess. Well, she's drooling a little bit. Well, I suppose, you know, even goddesses do drool and snore too, apparently, but be very careful not to wake her. Meanwhile, her brother and husband, Jupiter, have been thinking up ways to impart godlike qualities on his baby, Hercules,

who was born to a mortal woman, Acmini. And he has a cunning plan, of course he does. He lays Hercules at Juno's breast while she sleeps, thinking that if he feeds on her milk, perhaps he'll get godlike qualities. I don't know, I don't know what that means. He starts glowing, he's really good at impressions. I don't know what that means. But that's his thinking.

But, oh no, what is this? Juno has woken up. Of course she's woken up because it breastfeeding fucking hurts, Jupiter, you idiot. But Juno is awake, and she's pushed the baby away, causing a jet of milk to spurt across the room and the skies. And that is more than a disaster for the upholstery, betwixters. That is how the Milky Way was created.

You heard it here. Science. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry.

And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal in Society. With me, Kate Lister. Milky Goodness is all around us, no? but has our opinion of breastfeeding of the origin of the milky goodness, the boob, has this changed throughout history? Well, art may hold some answers to this. For example, what can a strange 14th century painting of the Madonna breastfeeding the baby Jesus tell us about the confusion between boobs as erotic and boobs as maternal? And that is Madonna the Mother of Christ, not Madonna the singer, right? Glad we cleared that one up.

The history and experience of breastfeeding is so much more than these rose-tinted glimpses let on. And in today's episode, we are joined by art historian and author of Milk, an intimate history of breastfeeding, Joanna Wolfarth, to find out more. And a very special thank you to our listener, Laura, who kindly got in touch to suggest this topic for us. Hi, between the sheets. My name's Laura. I'm from Yorkshire, and I'm a big fan of your show. In fact, it's got me through some very lonely late nights this past six months. I had my second baby, so that's meant a lot of staying up late, breast pumping, breastfeeding,

sterilising, bottle feeding. And it did get me thinking, what did people use to do before they had all this equipment? It would be so good if you could do a show on the history of breastfeeding. Keep up the great work. Thanks. Bye. Oh, thank you, Laura. You absolute legend. I'm so glad that we could do this for you. and I'm thrilled to keep you company on those late nights. But, before we get into this episode,

I have a little favour to ask you my lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely betwixties. If you are enjoying betwixt, we would love it. If you would just take a couple of seconds out of your super busy day to vote for us at the Listeners' Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards. If you follow the link in the show notes, you can do it, it'll take seconds. Honestly, it will make us so ridiculous. We were shortlisted last year and, well, we just missed out and you don't want to see my producers if we have to miss out again this year. They're violent people, betwixters. Please vote now.

They'll beat me if we don't win. But enough of that. Let's get back to the milk. I am ready for this if you are. Let's do it. And welcome to betwixta sheets. It's only Joanna Woolfarth. How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thank you. How are you? I am so excited to talk to you because you have just written a book on the history of breastfeeding. Yes. That's amazing. What a subject. I know, I know.

And I feel like I only managed to get just a tiny bit of the history into the book. There is so much and it's so interesting. I mean, there have been histories written before going back a few decades. But I couldn't believe that it kind of hadn't been done already when I was looking for one myself. That's exactly what I thought when I saw the book was out and I was like, oh God, of course. And I love it when I get subjects

and historians to do that is that it's so amazing that the subject and then you think, it must have been research before. It kind of has, but not like in the depth that you're doing it.

So I'm so excited to talk to you about this utterly fascinating and very, very, is it a niche history? I was going to say it's niche, but then we've all kind of been fed as babies, right? Presumably. Right, exactly. And I think this is what I come up against

with the book. And I think with not only with feeding our babies, but just kind of anything related to kind of caregiving and motherhood or actually anything to do with the female experience is seen as a very kind of niche subject. So the idea that you probably wouldn't pick up a book on menstruation or the experience of going through the menopause if you haven't gone through it or you're about to go through it. Right. It's seen as something that is kind of niche. Yet at the same time, we are all born of a wood. And we were all presumably, as you said, fed milk in one form or another, for quite a while after birth. So, yes, it's niche, but also not at all. It's universal. It's humanity's first food. Right?

What made you want to tell that history? Was it that you're like, oh, I want to know a bit more about it. And then you realise that actually, no one has written this. I need to do this. I've got to do this. A little bit, yeah. So I'm an art historian. So obviously I've kind of seen a lot of mother and child kind of images, you know,

from all over the world and all over different periods of time and kind of didn't really pay much attention to them really. It wasn't really where my interest like, you know, knew that breast milk was, you know, the best and is an amazing substance and has got all these kind of links to mythical stories. And I knew all of that. It wasn't until I had my own baby and was breastfeeding myself that I suddenly realized that although we talk about breastfeeding in terms of it being the natural thing to do. And often I think natural can be synonymous with it being easy. Well, for some people it is, for me it was not. But also I think we view it as something that is a historical that because we're mammals and we've been doing it forever in order to survive,

that it isn't influenced by, you know, cultural change, societal changes, that it's something that kind of just happens. And I was really. interested in knowing more about that, you know, more about how attitudes towards breastfeeding has changed over time and place. I was looking for the book as a relatively new parent and I couldn't find it. And I had that kind of confidence, I think, that is born of severe sleep deprivation that I could do it and that it should be done. And I wanted to do it quite kind of immediately, you know, while I was going through the experience myself. Of course. Why wouldn't that be a perfect time to write this. Because I knew if I waited, I'd forget the experience myself.

Good point. Or you start to, you know, you look back maybe rose tinted glasses or you move on with your life and your research. And so it felt I had a real impatience as well to get stuck into it. I have never had kids. I have never fed anyone with my jugs. They've been eaten off of a few times, but that's not the same thing. So when you're explaining this stuff to me, like there's loads of this that I just don't know on a biological level. And when I knew I was talking to, I started doing some research. And I realized that my knowledge around breastfeeding is enormous. You might say, well, obviously, Kate, you've never had to do it.

But isn't that weird that just like people are walking around? And like, I've got no idea really how it works, what the process is, what it does on the body, what the effects of the body are, how long are you're supposed to do it for, when do you stop? And I've got friends, obviously, that have had kids. And when you said there that people think it's easy, yeah, they all thought that it was. was going to be easy. They thought that it was going to be like, you know, going to be sat on a lily pad and it was going to be this very, like, lovely experience. And then I look at them like a few weeks later and they're like, my tits look like they've been gnawed on by a rat. That's

what's happened here. Right. Exactly. Well, that's the kind of maternal imagery I think we've grown up with. That's what I thought it would be like. Yeah, right? And I think that's a kind of consequence of we can think of the Madonna and child. And, you know, this really beautiful, serene, He's this very pious, dedicated mother. You know, or you think of all the artists that have done Madonna and child versions. And they are often very kind of serene and the babies in a cradle pose. And there's a halo and it's all, you know, muted colours. That's the picture we all have in our head, right?

That's the one. We do it. The reality, for many, completely different. You know, you've got like your tits all over the place. You're leaking. There are cases throughout history. where women have been advised to nurse animals to kind of toughen up their boobs. What?

Yeah, or puppies were used to draw out milk. Mary Wollstonecraft is the example of that. Yes. So when Mary Wollstonecraft, you know, after giving birth, when she was severely ill, full of fever, there was this fear that fever and heating up the body might cause problems with the milk. it might turn the milk back. So you don't want to give the baby that milk. But obviously it's uncomfortable to be that engorged. They were hoping maybe to draw out the fever. And so you have to find another technology to do that. And often it would be nursing an animal or something. I don't know what to

do with this information. I've got to go on with the podcast. And I feel like I just need to sit here and just go, what? Just digest. What? Is there any method in that madness or is that completely deranged? Like is there any benefit at all to breastfeeding a dog after? In terms of like whether it's going to make your milk bad, I'm not a biologist, but being poorly is not going to turn your milk bad. Getting hot is not going to turn your milk bad. I mean, for a long time there was a belief that having sexual intercourse while lactating would sour your milk.

So, you know, that is not true. In terms of needing to toughen up your body, no. You don't need to do that. There's no method in this madness. One of the other things, when it comes to childbirth and growing babies and all of it and looking after them and breastfeeding and all these things, it seems to me that we are spectacularly badly designed. Like, why is it so difficult for humans to feed their babies?

It should be that easy. Like, why is it so difficult? That seems like a massive design fault. What's going on? What causes the difficulty? It's a really good question. Because presumably, this was the question that I had when I was feeding a baby. Because I was like, presumably it can't have been all this difficult for most of history.

Right. We just wouldn't survive, right? So I do think there is probably a difficulty that we have now in, you know, the expectations maybe we have of breastfeeding. I think also the information maybe that we're given. We're maybe not told that there might be periods where it's going to be maybe a bit painful or your baby's going to be feeding possibly constantly at the very beginning to get your supply going. You know, and that's normal. I think because of the sort of rise in the early 20th century of what was termed scientific motherhood, where women's bodies, there was this attempt to kind of quantify them and regulate them as you were to kind of machine, you know, to be more scientific about it.

So the advice was to feed by the clock. So just feed your baby every three hours or every four hours. And of course, that's not how babies work. You know, they're not a factory. They don't clock in. So I think the expectation that we maybe come to the experience with doesn't serve us very well. I've had people tell me that they don't want to scare us off by telling us. And obviously for some women, they don't have any problems at all. But they don't want to scare us off by potentially saying you might have some trouble with that.

There seems to be a lot of that. Oh, it might be a bit hard. We won't do it. As if we don't do difficult things all the time. I love that. It's too late now. Yeah, we thought that you might get a bit upset. but you know we're here now.

Yeah, that kind of really paternalist patronising idea that we might not do it if we knew the potential reality. Just grown a human and pushed it out of your hoo-ha. But the idea of a dried-up nipple might be a bit much by that point. Yeah, they don't want to put us off. So you're an art historian, and I'm trying to bring to mind now all the images of mothers, nursing babies throughout art history that I've seen.

And most of them are that Madonna and the baby Jesus, where she looks super chill. and the baby looks about four for some peculiar reason and there's like one boob out. But going back like further than that, there must be much earlier images of breastfeeding and are there any pictures of like a mother just sat there going, this is shit?

Or like with sore nipples? Or is it all this kind of like, oh God, it's so natural and lovely. I'm having a great time. No, there is a lot of imagery going back further where we get maybe a glimpse of what it might have looked like in everyday life. So going right, right back, I mean, we get breastfeeding parent and child figures going right back to the Indus Valley, civilisations, a harappa,

5,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, these beautiful terracotta figurines. And interestingly, most of those figures are reclining while they feed. So rather than being in that really upright, stiff pose that we kind of picture Mary being in, which actually isn't always the easiest way to do it. Is that not the easiest? See, I didn't know that. Your arm's going to hurt. You're probably not going to get a good latch.

So probably reclining you. down, the baby may be lying on you or something. I mean, it depends on your body and your baby. But those figures indicate a more kind of, yeah, that's probably what it looked like. We've got figures from, for example, 14th century Thailand. There's this whole series of beautiful ceramic images of mothers and babies. They look like they're just sort of chilling out. I think it's partly the way that they've been kind of grouped in the curation of these figures now, but they've all sat together. The mothers are chewing beetle nut. They've got their little bulging their cheeks. So they're obviously chewing some dry tobacco or beetlenut or something.

And they're feeding their babies and just maybe look like they're hanging out. And my absolute favourite, which I have to mention, is a sixth century bronze from Indonesia of a woman sitting very upright with her legs out straight in front of her and she's got her foot loom. So she's obviously a weaver. Wow. She's at work. She's weaving. She's being productive. She's obviously had to stop doing that to feed her baby and she's holding her baby. And it's such a a beautiful perfect representation because anyone who's fed a baby will know that while you're feeding, the baby is probably tweaking your other nipple if it can. And this is what this baby is doing. So we get this really lovely detail. It's very kind of life-like and accurate. What do you mean

tweaking the other nipples? I'm learning so much. They'll just be playing with it. Babies just fiddle. Their hand will be in your mouth. You want to be older. They'll be pulling your hair. They want to be entertained while they eat. So, you know. That's so sweet. That like all the, thousands of years ago that someone captured that in a little bronze, that little bit of human experience. Yeah. And you look at the face and the woman's face is very mask-like. She looks very hollow-eyed and probably, you know, something that will look very familiar to a new parent. You know, she just looks a bit weary. But you brought up a really interesting point there. So this figure is weaving. So she's at work, which then makes me want to ask the question, like throughout, I think

there's a lot of history to go through. But how did historically women deal with this? Like you've had the baby, thunk, there it is. But now you still have to go and earn your money. Would people take babies with them to work? I mean, now we, thankfully, in most countries, we have maternity leave, which is where you rightfully recover, feed the baby, you know.

But presumably people must have had to carry on and go to work. Well, yeah. I mean, I think that would have been how most women, and still today in a lot of places in the world, in a lot of communities, that's what they do. and that's what they're able to do. So they're maybe working in the home. Maybe they're weaving, you know, doing something within the home.

They're farming. They take the babies out with them to the fields or whatever. So if you're a woman that does have to work, then you would have been balancing that. And there are some lovely images, lovely Dutch paintings of a tailor shop where you've got, you know, everyone's working in the shop. You've got the men's to work. And then the woman's just one side feeding the baby. And then presumably she'll go back to whatever she was doing after that. So obviously there were ways that women balance.

that for many women breastfeeding was their job. You know, they were wet nurses. That was their work. But it's the changes that came with industrialisation that really completely altered how we, I guess, work and parent, that kind of strict division. You have to go to the factory. You have to be there for a certain time.

You can't bring your baby. That really changes things. Let's talk about wet nurses because they are fascinating figures historically. And again, I was trying to do a bit of research around like knowing that I was going to talk to you. And the question I just keep coming back to it is explain to me what the need for a wet nurse was because it's tempting to think that, well, that's just rich people. Rich people have the baby.

It's thunk it's out. Take it away. And then someone else feeds it, nurses it, raises it. And then once in a while you look at it and go, oh, smashing. That's still there. But it seems like it was much more widespread than that. It wasn't just really, really wealthy people. So what was the need to have someone else breastfeed your baby?

What was that? Well, I mean, for most of history, that was the only reliable way. to feed your baby if you couldn't. Of course. So it would have arisen from need first. So it would have been the case that if you couldn't feed your baby or if you had to be absent or, you know, the mother was very, very ill after delivery. The only way for that baby to survive is to be nursed by somebody else. Now that still happens in communities and certain societies all around the world. And it's something that's done as a kind of, it's a kinship relationship, right? And, And it happens here in the UK as well. And for the book, I spoke to women who had maybe nursed

their friend's baby for a bit or their auntie had nursed them for a feed. Like, it does happen still. We just don't talk about that. We're quite squeamish about that. I was just going to say, why do I feel oddly squeamish about that? That doesn't make any sense when I actually press pause on that. I have drunk cow's milk this morning in a coffee, but the idea of human milk of like my mum's friend like nursing me or something, that made me go, what is that? That's a weird. reaction actually. What is that? I think it's a combination of things. So it's, I suppose, the intimacy, maybe of the act. I suppose it's within our culture. We're very confused about the breast when it's maternal and sexual and the nipple. And even thinking about feeding from our mum's

nipple, we can be a bit weird about it. Yeah, we've got this confusion, which doesn't exist everywhere. but also I think there is that lingering belief that you are transmitting something through the milk as well. Perhaps. And so even in some of these communities which practice shared feeding where you might have your sister feed your baby when you have to leave. In some of these communities there are taboos around what you would expect your milky sister, as they might be called, to eat, for example. you don't want them to eat a food that is going to, you know, somehow compromise the milk or something like that. I see.

But also, you know, there's sort of a long history in the West as well about what can be transmitted through milk. So you want to make sure you're choosing somebody to feed your baby that's going to be passing on good qualities, basically. So I wonder if that's also part of the squeamishness that we have now. It's that lingering effect of, well, if it's not mum feeding me, what would I've been getting from this other person's milk. God, yeah.

You haven't found any evidence for that weird squeamishness throughout history. Wet nursing was just absolutely fine. That was, no one would have even battered an eyelid at it. Yes and no. So wet nursing, as you said before, you know, for very, very wealthy people,

it was a sign of status. It was also partly because often, again, there's that fear that if you have sexual intercourse while you're breastfeeding, it's going to ruin your milk. So if you want your wife, to return to the marital bed, you don't want her to be breastfeeding.

So you want to outsource that. That makes perfect rich sense. Like, how does that work that? So presumably, this is what I mean, that I don't know the mechanics, really well. A wet nurse, in order to be producing milk, she must have had to have had a baby, right?

At some point. Like, what is that process? That if you're a professional midwife, you must have to get pregnant, have the baby, and then how long do you go around with milk for? How long can you be employed before you need to get pregnant again.

I mean, the milk is produced on a supply and demand basis. And there's actually been cases recently of women inducing lactation in themselves without giving birth. No. So same-sex couples, for example, who through a combination of kind of trying to express milk, so kind of stimulating the nipple, trying to express milk, and then maybe using different hormones, you can induce lactation. I mean, when I read about this, when I was breastfeeding in my brain, baby, I felt nothing but envy.

I was like, that's awesome, but that can be done in terms of like partnership equity. But for a wet nurse, going back in time, so long as they've lactated at something, you can just keep lactating. Just keep going. So long as something is consuming the milk, you know, it's supply and demand. So you can just keep going and you can keep going for years. Years. Mind you, you do sometimes here, don't you?

Like someone will make the news of like, yeah, I still breastfeed my five-year-old and then everyone goes mental. Yeah. And if you're a wet nurse and you're a nurse and you're a nurse. continuing employed, you could just, you know, you'll be a wet nurse. Presumably you could do it for decades. Wow. Do we have records of famous wet nurses?

Is that even like, or were they just sort of just the background people that were just feeding the great and the good? Well, not just the great and the good, just people. Do we have any names of people? We do. We do. So we do know that wet nurses were really kind of celebrated and appreciated. So we've got an engraving on a gravestone from fourth century BC, Athens.

where the person that was fed by the wet nurse has written this kind of beautiful poem. Let me find it here. This is where Hippostrati's good nurse lies. He still misses you. I loved you when you were alive, nurse. I love you still, not even below the earth. And now I shall honour you as long as I live. So we know that there was a lot of affection and memorialising and kind of remembering wet nurses in ancient Egypt.

If you witnessed a royal baby, then you would be given a high status. You would be the one who nurtured the God. So you would be afforded this, like, great title. Your own children would be afforded the title of kind of royal milk kin. Because there's this idea that there's a kinship relationship between children that are fed by the same woman. And these nurses were represented in tomb paintings. And so they were commemorated. I'll be back with Joanna and Milky Boobes after the first.

short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipskin, and on not just the Tudors from History Hit, my guests and I run through the full gamut of human emotion and experience. From the heartbreak of the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth, not being able to marry, arguably the only man in the world she ever really

wanted to marry, may have, for that reason, not married anyone else. To a prenatal battle of the sexes. A male and a female seed meet in the womb at conception, and whichever one is stronger determines the sex of the unborn child. From Lady Jane Gray facing her executioner. You can't help but feel just the utmost sympathy for this young girl. To why the laughing cavalier is, well, laughing.

He strikes me as someone who goes off on a sort of swaggering booze up. Subscribe now to not just the tutors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. We call the Milky Way the Milky Way because there's a breastfeeding start. there. Yes it is. So that's the story of, so this is the god Jupiter. He goes off and he fathers a half-mortal son with a mortal woman. And he's really concerned because he wants his son, Hercules, to have full immortality and divine powers. And the way to do this in his mind is for Hercules to be breastfed by Jupiter's wife, Juno. And so what Jupiter does is he takes his son up, to find Juno. She's having a sleep and he puts Hercules to Juno's breast while she's sleeping.

She obviously wakes up, alarmed, like what the hell is going on? A jet of her breast milk shoots out up into the sky and each droplet becomes a star in the Milky Way. And those that drop to the earth apparently become lilies. And I love that story because it's got these two separate strands to it. One is the divine attributes that we give to milk and to motherhood. We know it's amazing stuff. You know, it's created the stars. And actually, Galaxy, Galactica and Lactic have the same etymological roots and origins. Yes. It's all about boobs. I had no idea. It's all about boobs and it's all about milk. On the other hand, you know, we've got this husband who seems to have no issue with kind of coercing his wife to feed while she's sleeping.

without her consent. So it speaks again, I think, to ongoing historical issues around bodily autonomy for women. Speaking of which, it is true to say, so I'm quite pleased that there were wet nurses throughout history that achieved really powerful and empowered status. But there is also a very dark history of enslaved people being forced to breast feed babies, isn't there? Yes. And this is something that has had long-lasting intergenerational impact in North America. around black women and breastfeeding. So, yeah, if we're talking about the history of enslavement in North America, then yes, women would have been wet nursing the master's children,

often meaning that their own children missed out. We have accounts where it's like the mother would feed the master's child first and then the baby would get whatever was left over. Oh my God. Her own child. And I cannot imagine the complication of that kind of relationship. that you would have feeding your master's baby. And I cannot imagine that.

But there was that kind of characterisation of the black mammy. Yes. The feeder, the breastfeeding enslaved wetness. It had a long lasting effect. And so for a long time, I think breastfeeding rates among black communities in the US were lower for a variety of reasons. But that was one of those reasons. Oh, my God. It was the kind of intergenerational trauma around that.

Yeah. Wow. Oh, my God. Yeah. There's a very, very long history, isn't there, of, well, just being completely mad about anything to do with babies. Like sort of strange ideas that if the mother looks at something scary whilst she's pregnant, she'll give birth to an elephant. Or like weird, weird shit. The idea about milk and wet nurses and that something is transmitted via the mother to the baby,

how does that square when you are, like, enslaved people? Did they just stop with the idea that somebody should be really healthy and happy and having a great time in order to do this when it came to slavery? What was that? What's going on there? I think by that point, I think that attitude had changed. I think that really speaks to how historically and culturally specific our ideas about breastfeeding are. And how they can be controlled by what serves the interest of the patriarchy, basically. So if it serves their interests to have an enslaved person feed their children, they can probably like shift around their beliefs.

Yeah, then, yeah, okay. That's sort of what comes first, I think. But I mean, you're right to say that in other contexts and other historical periods, we have information from across lots of different cultures where we have written texts talking about the exact kind of person you want to choose as a wet nurse. Like a job description. Like a job description. So the influential 16th century English physician Thomas Reynolds writes, the affections and qualities of the nurse pass forth through the milk into the child, making the child of like condition and manners. therefore you want to make sure you pick someone who has got good moral characteristics. In a second century Greek text, we get the job description.

She's between 20 and 40, honest, even tempered, pleasant, in good health, has a good complexion, is of average size, her own child is less than two months old, and her milk is neither too clear nor too thick. And so we see these appearing again and again, see them in Hindu texts, ancient Sanskritic texts, talking about how the physical attributes you'd want as well as the moral attributes in order to transmit those desirable qualities to the baby. When did the wet nurse tradition die out? Because it was so widespread. Like what happened? Did all the wet nurses just turn up at the job centre one day? And it was like, actually, no, just sorry,

sorry girls, we're closed for business. Why did it die out? I suppose what I'm going to is, how have we ended up where we are, but why did the figure of the wetness stop being so popular? I think, again, there's loads of different factors that go into that. I think one of those factors is a shift in around the 18th century about how we think about motherhood and the image of the maternal mother. Okay. And I think that goes hand in hand with the changes in attitudes towards kind of female sexual pleasure as well.

Right. And so moving away from that idea of mutual sexual pleasure being quite important into ideas of the separation of sexuality and maternity, like really happens in a really clear-cut way. And we start to see this characterization of the mother as someone who is self-sacrificing, sentimental, nurturing, non-sexual, instinctive, all of those kind of things that I think we still probably associate in a large way with the idea of kind of the ideal mother. And one of the reasons I think that we see that. shift towards that kind of mother and that encouragement for mothers to feed their own babies.

One is that ongoing concern that wet nurses are passing on undesirable characteristics of the children. And we have men in the 19th century writing in adulthood about how their wetness was to blame because they've got bad health in that. Don't tell them that, Joanna. That will start making a comeback of course. Well, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like, well, it wasn't. breastfed, therefore, this and this. Or I was breastfed by a wetness and that's why I'm really poorly as an adult. That's where I can't hold down a job. Right, exactly. So we start to get men kind of complaining, right, basically, that we're fed by a wetness and that encouragement towards women of all classes feeding their own babies. Wow. But that also goes alongside

the changes towards, I suppose, how we think about women and how we think about motherhood. I mean, the classic example is Jean-Jacques Rousseau writing at the end of the 18th century. Oh, he's got something to say, does he? Mr. I Love Being Spanked has got something to say about this. Oh, yeah. Rousseau is such a central figure to the shift towards getting women, but she wealthier women, to breastfeed their own babies. And he argues in a meal that it's not only for the good of the child, but it's also for the good of mankind, for the morality of the entire nation,

for the good of civilization and for man, is to go back to that kind of nature and to have, the noble savage again. Right, exactly. And to have a mother breastfeed her own child rather than pass it onto a wet nurse, this is the same Rousseau that had five children and sent them to foundling hospitals. So again, the hypocrisy of it is stark. Wow. Yeah. Stay in your damn lane, Rousseau, I think is the message there. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, he had nothing to do with his own children. But he was a really central figure in Western Europe towards this making breastfeeding your own child more fashionable for the elites, for the wealthy, and kind of disparaging the wet nurse

as being this kind of low-class, immoral character. At the same time, the practicalities of breastfeeding your own child, even in an economic sense, which would be familiar to, I guess, lots of listeners who are trying to balance like work and childcare, meant that in, in the sort of late 18th century Paris, an early 19th century Paris, it was more economically viable for the middle classes to keep the mother employed in her job. They needed a dual income and then pay for a rural wet nurse to feed the baby. A rural wet nurse? Yeah, so they would send the babies out of Paris to be fed by wet nurses because obviously it's cheaper. They live in the countryside, You know.

Oh, it's like a weird away day for the baby. Yeah, but away years. Fuck, years. God. Yes. Of course. Why wouldn't you do that? Of course.

Right. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Right. But I imagine for a lot of people, for some it would have been something they did by choice. I think for others, it was just because it's what made economic sense. You could earn more working in a factory

and then pay some of your salary to somebody else to feed your baby. Okay. then obviously you can't afford to stay at home with the baby. Yeah. So we've got this situation where we've got the same time that Rousseau is, Emil is out and everyone's talking about, you know, for the good of the Republic, everyone's got to feed their babies. In one year alone, so in 1780, there were 21,000 babies registered births in Paris.

Only a thousand of those were registered as being fed by their birth mother. Wow. So you've got about 20,000 babies potentially being sent out to wet nurses. many of those would have been sent out into the countryside. And there was this whole profession set up of people that were like the go-betweens between the city and the countryside to pay the wet nurses. There was a whole bureau set up to dealt with this. This was like wet nursing on a kind of industrial scale.

Yeah. And again, you're stuck in an impossible buying as a mother. You're being told it's the best thing to do. But also the reality is that it's not always feasible or it makes more sense to do it a different way. What actually happens is something very different. I was laughing there at the idea that men would blame something that was happening right now on the fact that they were fed by a wet nurse. But now I remember that I saw a headline article in the news only last week.

There was something like babies that are breastfed get better GCSEs, or it was like one of those ones that pops up from time to time. So actually, although I thought that was really funny, we're still doing that. There's still this, like, if you're not breastfeeding your baby, then society will crumble around you, you horrible, horrible person. Exactly. Yeah, we are still in that position where, yeah, so the study was that the duration of breastfeeding possibly increased the number of A and A stars, GCSEs in maths and English. Not while they're doing the exam, though, surely. No, you don't have to feed them for 16 years. That's a whole other study. That would be a completely different study, definitely. And obviously, studies like this come out time and again.

And what was different about this study was that they did claim that they had completely adjusted for all other possible factors. Because, you know, it's impossible to look at just feeding alone because demographically speaking, we know that you're more likely to breastfeed in the UK if you're an older mother, if you have a higher level of education, probably maybe if you've got a corresponding then higher household income. Obviously, all those things are also going to be massive factors in your kind of educational attainment. So it's really very, very hard. I don't know how you manage to do a study that takes out all of those factors. And I don't believe this study did manage to adjust for all of those factors. But what's interesting to me is the headlines they generate. And the way that those headlines are used to beat individual mothers,

it's another stick to beat us with to make us feel guilty and shamed. But it's always the onus on the individual woman. And that's also what you kind of see through history. The onus is on the woman as an individual rather than saying, if we care about exam results, if we think breastfeeding does have this result as a society, as a government, then we should support and invest and do all of these things. And we don't, you know, culturally as a society, we don't treat parents particularly well, certainly not mothers. I mean, I don't have babies. I've never breastfed anyone. I still feel the pressure of like breast is best, breast is best. And that,

you know, if you bottle feed that you've done something horrendously wrong, is there science behind this? Or is that a kind of like a leftover echo from Russo and the other philosophers saying, you know, they're like, oh, you have to do this because otherwise France will fall. Is there truth to this? So there is evidence that there is short, medium and potentially long-term benefits to breastfeeding. And to having breast milk. Now, I know some people exclusively pump. So they don't actually feed directly from the nipple.

They feed their baby breast milk. But we know that there are some benefits to that. and some health benefits and some broader economic benefits for a country, for example. But I think often we look at those in isolation and we don't think about, some women just don't want to feed from their own bodies and that's totally cool. Some people just don't want to do it. Some people don't have the support network and the community around them. Maybe they have a family who thinks it's gross.

Maybe they have a partner who kind of is maybe quite territorial about the breasts. Maybe they don't have good maternity leave. maybe there's physiological factors. There's loads of things. And breastfeeding, a lot of people really try and try and it's really detrimental to their mental health. That was certainly my case. So, yeah, I think, yeah, there are benefits, but I think they have to be looked at in the bigger picture. And actually, you know, we all know people who formula fed and they're healthy and successful. And I think a lot of it is a backlash against the kind of marketing tactics that formula companies use in the 20th century. And I think we often conflate formula as a medical product, as a product

that I'm so grateful that we do have now with the kind of marketing practices of formula corporations. And I think it's quite easy to conflate the two. I mean, I'm glad we have formula. I'm glad I don't have to worry about feeding my baby yucky, unpasturized, unsanitary goat milk in a really old, disgusting bottle because we don't know about basic hygiene. God, yeah. One of the things that we've never, well, maybe history says something different, but right now we seem to be very uncomfortable, some people seem to be very uncomfortable because we haven't quite squared the boob, which is an erotic, lovely thing for sexual pleasure, with the boob as food. We seem to be very, very mixed up about that. And that's obviously

what leads to the occasional headline where some poor woman has been thrown out of a restaurant for daring to feed her baby. But at the same thing, time huge pumped up jugs everywhere and that's amazing but we seem very uncomfortable with what they're actually there for yes definitely definitely and i think that discomfort i mean it's very stark in society today as you said like the kind of we don't want to see it in public it's also the breast but also the idea of milk this like fluid it could be a potential contagion we don't like women's bodies they're quite abject and disgusting and we certainly don't want to think about anything that comes out of our bodies.

And again, I think that goes back to this centuries-long history of believing that milk was menstrual blood that was transformed. I have read that, yes. And so that's also a bit squeamish. But I definitely think with the question of the boob, I mean, going back to thinking about the Madonna and Child, there was that issue a lot in the kind of representations of like, well, how do we show her breastfeeding and show her breast?

But without it showing part of her body, We don't want it to look erotic and tantalising. We don't want to think too much about the Virgin Mary's hooters or even just like her functioning female body. That's true. It's a virgin birth, right? And if it was a virgin birth, then does that still mean she can lactate if she wasn't menstruating? Like there's a lot of kind of questions to resolve or kind of maybe not to resolve and try and do away with by placing her boob up on her shoulder and showing it being quite detached from her body, which was one of the artistic strategies that they. used. They're like, well, we'll just make the breast look like a kind of stuck on appendage. And you do.

You see those images where you think that does not look right. The artist must have been shit. He's never seen a woman. Probably more likely, everyone would have seen breastfeeding. It's the only way we can do this without it being really weird for everybody. Yeah, exactly. It was just like the only way we can deal with this is to have a kind of really artificial breast that's really high up on her shoulder or that looks stuck on or, you know. As an art historian, there must be, and I don't know of any, but you must know of some, like artists who are doing things with breastfeeding right now. Like, has anybody done that? Like, they're doing things with breast milk or they're doing like, what's going on in the art world right now? There's so much exciting stuff that is happening around breastfeeding and lactation in art.

Some of my favourites are, so Jess Dobkin, he's a Canadian artist. She has done several iterations of something called lactation station. The first one was in the early 2000s. What she does is she gets some volunteers to donate some breast milk. She pasturises that breast milk, which was something she had to do, obviously, for the Canadian authorities to kind of agree for this artwork to take place. And then she sets up a kind of wine tasting, but it's breast milk tasting. Wow.

In white cube gallery spaces. And I think it's quite interesting that she does it in those kind of spaces. It's kind of the white cube is the hygiene of it. It's quite sterile space. Then she invites people to come and taste the breast milk. And she gives them all names based on the flavors because, for example, you've had a very, very strong curry, then some of those flavors, subtle flavors might come through in your next round of milk. So all breast milk tastes different.

So she's doing this and I think it's so interesting because she's looking at breast milk kind of as a product. She's thinking about the labour involved in it. But she's also thinking about honoring it in some way. And there was a lovely critic writing, and he writes about the breast milk and tasting it in the kind of language that he would use if he was reviewing any other kind of food or wine product. And it was so beautiful to read. So I love her work and what she's doing. Joanna, you have been incredible to talk to. My final question, so you said that you started this research while you were breastfeeding and maybe to help you understand your own processes around that. Did the book help you resolve some issues around breastfeeding? It did. It did massively because even though I knew that, for example,

representations of breastfeeding had changed over time, I'd forgotten all of that in early motherhood. I kind of had internalised this idea that I had to be this kind of perfect, virtuous maternal mother that it was all on me and that it wasn't about the wider cultural and societal kind of structures that I live within. And so it really helped me looking back over time to see how different attitudes have changed. And to put it into a kind of really kind of feminist space of thinking about, well, it's connected to my female body.

And it's part of my kind of lineage of existence going back from, you know, puberty when you're first very, very aware that you inhabit this body and that you're being objectified and scrutinized in the, public sphere and that all of that comes into motherhood. You don't leave that behind at the door. And so, yeah, it was incredibly therapeutic for me. And I just hope that it might do the same for somebody who's also kind of struggling with their identity in those first weeks of motherhood. Joanna, you've been amazing. And if people want to know more about you and your book, where can they find you? So you can find me on my website, Joanna Welfth.com. That's got links to lots of different stuff.

and then I'm usually, although rather sporadically, on Instagram at Joanna underscore Walth. And the full title of the book? Milk, An Intimate History of Breastfeeding. You have just been fabulous to talk to. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. It's been great.

Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Joanna for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe, wherever it is, did you get your podcasts? I mean, you know the drill by now, right? If you'd like us to explore a subject, like Laura did when she requested breastfeeding as an episode, then you can email us and you can get us at betwixt at history hit.com. You don't even have to email us to suggest an episode. We really like reading the ones where you just email us to go, hello.

Honestly, we do like those ones too. Just swing by. We have got episodes on Victorian birth control and the history of lube all heading your way very soon. This podcast was produced and edited by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer is Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.