This work of fiction began in the long days and nights of nursing and nurturing my baby. As I held her in my arms and listened to the ticking of a clock, a voice came now and then into my mind. It was the voice of an unwed mother from long ago.
Sometimes she railed against being cast out, with her life derailed for good, while her lover walked freely among respected persons. Sometimes my own moments merged with hers, as when I marveled at the calm that descended while nursing or felt a fatigue I could never before have imagined. After placing my sleeping infant down, I walked to my desk and jotted those words onto scraps of paper.
While pregnant, I was inclined to study. I followed the stages of a growing human. I looked into practices of labor and delivery and armed myself with all manner of ideas and stuff. I considered these acts to be preparatory, even protective. Yet for my own specific labor, and for the actuality of caring for the infant who emerged, I was utterly unprepared.
So perhaps this was when the door to Lilli’s story opened: when I was stunned at being the basis of a newborn’s survival and awed by how my body and heart changed in service of her. Becoming a mother was no small shift in identity. I would never see any aspect of living in the same way again.
One more ingredient was vital to the brewing story. When we were a few months into parenthood, my husband showed me a review by Joan Acocella of The History of the European Family, a multi-editor, three-volume work that includes much tragic information about families in the past. I read there of the prevalence of so-called illegitimate births in Europe, at times over 50 percent. I’d known that having a baby deemed fatherless meant shame for mother and child, but I hadn’t fully considered the costs of such prejudice. Many mothers gave up their infants to institutions or alleyways or worse, or struggled hard to keep them, and those infants often died.
Then there was the abject poverty that led couples with too many mouths to feed to give up their new babies. When the price of bread rose, so did the numbers of abandoned infants. Many infants with wealthier parents also perished; out of tradition and preference, newborns were brought to the homes of wet nurses, often in the country, who cared for multiple babies at once and couldn’t protect them from fast-circulating diseases and an insufficient diet.
I hadn’t known this vast history of infant death. Bits of understanding began to germinate in my consciousness. As I nursed, the woman’s voice continued to speak. A small pile of scraps formed. I began to research.
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The tragedies observed in Europe also took place in the newer nation across the sea. Of foundlings, social-work pioneer Amos Warner noted in his 1894 book American Charities, it “can matter little to the individual infant whether it is murdered outright or is placed in a foundling hospital.” And wet nursing, in its various settings, was also characterized by infant death.
Because babies had a too-great chance of dying while away “at nurse,” urban families began bringing wet nurses as servants into their homes. Unwed mothers were a ready population to fill these positions, because they had fresh milk and, often, no place to live and no other decent work options. So at a time when character was believed to pass from nipple to mouth, mothers viewed as immoral were nevertheless invited into homes to nurse strangers’ infants.
These women might have become pregnant by accident or by force. They might have found themselves unaided due to the father’s desertion or death, due to rejection and expulsion by their families, or some combination. Regardless of the cause of their pregnancies and desperation, such women and their infants were—and in many places still are—separated and punished.
In order to become a live-in wet nurse, too, the unwed mother usually had to give up her infant or board it elsewhere. For if it stayed with her, she might have favored it—or she simply might not have had enough milk for two babies. But her infant, whether boarded with a woman feeding multiple infants or surrendered to an institution, had a small chance of surviving. As physician Charles West observed about this arrangement in his 1874 Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, “by the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman, the offspring of the wealthy will be preserved.”
Why was the separation of mother and infant usually deadly? Because no safe substitute for human milk existed. Cow’s milk, the usual substitute, was often problematic. It might have been thinned with unclean water or not kept cool on its trip from udder to household; it might have contained harmful bacteria, including those causing tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, and diarrhea. Doctors of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth made note of the often revolting condition of milk, as here: “[W]hile mother’s milk is free from germs, cow’s milk, as ordinarily obtained, swarms with them, and often contains manure and other filth.”* Bottles, too, were frequently contaminated, from inadequate cleaning.
In the United States, milk safety improved in the twentieth century with more oversight, more cooling to retard spoilage, and more effective pasteurization. But it is still true in many places on earth that the milk of human mothers is crucial to infants’ survival.
I thought of my imaginary wet nurse, worrying about her baby from an intolerable distance; I thought of her baby, whose life was threatened by the absence of her mother’s milk and care. Could such a mother accomplish what many wet nurses intended? Could she find a situation that would keep her baby alive while she saved money by working as a servant, then reclaim her baby and create a better life?
In her definitive work A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (1996), Janet Golden notes that these women left no accounts of their experiences, stating that “wet nurses remain historically silent.”
My narrator would tell her story.
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