Mothers' Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South

Wet-nursing is a uniquely gendered kind of exploitation, and under slavery it represented the point at which the exploitation of enslaved women as workers and as reproducers literally intersected. Feeding another woman's child with one's own milk constituted a form of labor, but it was work that could only be undertaken by lactating women who had borne their own children. As a form of exploitation specific to slave mothers, enforced wet-nursing constituted a distinct aspect of enslaved women's commodification. The evocative image of an enslaved wet nurse, carefully holding a white child to her breast in order to provide sustenance through her own milk, therefore holds much resonance for historians interested in gender, slavery, and relationships between black and white women in the antebellum South. Wet-nursing bound women together across the racial divide, and white women also sometimes wet-nursed enslaved infants. Yet ultimately, white women used wet-nursing as a tool to manipulate enslaved women's motherhood for slaveholders' own ends.

EMILY WEST is an associate professor of history at the University of Reading. R. J. Knight is a Ph.D. student at the University of Reading.

There have been many different forms of wet-nursing in the past, involving highly complex social relations.1 By exploring the practice within broader, long-run contexts of mothers' exploitation across time and space and under a variety of different regimes, one of which was antebellum U.S. slavery, historians can illuminate power structures that resonate with gendered, racial, and class exploitation, where a woman's race and status impacted her ability to make choices about infant feeding. Patterns of wet-nursing thus vary within different historical contexts; and while at times the practice might have involved acts of altruism by women who shared their milk, at other times, for example under antebellum slavery, wet-nursing took on a more exploitative angle.2 Wet-nursing fostered both physical closeness and racial distance between enslaved and white women, and opportunities for resistance on the part of enslaved wet nurses remained severely limited. Conversely, slaveholding women's relative power granted them choices about whether to use a wet nurse, and occasionally (and for a variety of reasons) white women wet-nursed enslaved infants. Enslaved women, too, sometimes shared their breast milk with each other in an example of more communal mothering processes. For the...