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Having just put together an edited volume on the contemporary patterns of mothering in North America (Akhtar, 2016), I found it refreshing to pick up Prophecy Coles' The Shadow of the Second Mother, for it is a book replete with historical information regarding nannies and wet nurses going back to early Roman times. The first two chapters of her book focus upon the deployment of wet nurses, either for the offspring of the highly-privileged or for babies abandoned by unwed mothers, many of whom were prostitutes. With painstaking detail, Coles traces the changing societal attitudes about abandoned infants, about wet nurses, about the fate of their own babies, about mothers who relegated the care of their babies to wet nurses, and about the psychological impact of wet nurses upon the children under their care.
On this informative sojourn, which frequently turns poignant, the author introduces us to a fresh lexicon that undergirds all discourse and conceptualization in this realm. Here are a few examples:
Delegated mothering: shifting most or all maternal care from the biological mother to a nanny or wet nurse (pp. 1, 36).
Wet nurse: a lactating woman who has given birth to a baby recently, hired to breast-feed the infant of another woman (p. 9).
Farming out or baby farming: the custom of sending newborn babies to be cared for by wet nurses in rural areas, a practice common among affluent families of the 18th century Europe, especially in England, France, and Italy (pp. 15, 35).
Infant abandonment: leaving a newborn baby at the steps of a church or at a public place, with the hope that it is found and cared for by others; the most extensive period of such practice occurred during the Roman Empire (p. 28).
Foundling Hospitals: institutions set by the Church across Europe for the care of abandoned infants; the first such hospital was built in Milan in the 8th century and the most renowned and well-documented being one in London in 1745 (pp. 29, 31).
Page 209Dry nursing: an experiment