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Welcome to the History Extra podcast.

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Fascinating historical conversations from

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BBC History Magazine and BBC

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history revealed. Breastfeeding

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may seem like an innate human experience

0:24

that transcends history. But

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according to art and cultural historian

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Joanna Woolf, experiences

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of feeding babies have always

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been embedded in social and cult troll

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customs. Her new book

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milk examines how attitudes

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to breastfeeding have changed over time.

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And I spoke to her to find out more about

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ancient baby bottles, the moral

0:48

dangers of wet nursing, and why

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the virgin Mary was sometimes depicted

0:53

with a breast on her shoulder.

0:55

Thank you so much for joining me, Joanna. It's

0:57

great to speak to you today about your new

0:59

book, which is milk an

1:01

intimate history of breastfeeding, but

1:04

tell us how you came to this. What

1:06

drew you to research the history

1:08

of breastfeeding?

1:09

Yeah. Thank you for having me. It was really when

1:11

I had my own baby. I always knew that I

1:13

personally wanted to breastfeed, but it

1:15

was only after I had my baby

1:17

and we went through quite a lot

1:19

of difficulties with feeding, and I

1:21

was surprised by just how much breastfeeding

1:24

meant to me as well. But while

1:26

I was going through all of these difficulties and all

1:28

of this joy with breastfeeding, I just

1:30

kept wondering, women have been doing

1:32

this for forever, why am I finding

1:34

it so hard? Am I alone in finding it

1:36

so hard? What what did women

1:38

do before? And I think because

1:42

breastfeeding is it's what defines

1:44

us as mammals. It's what, you know,

1:46

in many ways, biologically, we are designed

1:48

to do I think there's sometimes then

1:50

a tendency to think

1:53

that it is perhaps a historical

1:56

that it exists outside of

1:59

the realms of being influenced by social

2:01

and cultural history. And it's a historian

2:03

myself. It's an art historian myself. That

2:05

was also kind of the misconception I was probably

2:08

laboring under because I'd never given it much

2:10

thought. And so was only when I

2:12

started looking through the archives

2:14

while breastfeeding, I started

2:16

to understand how we have developed

2:19

such complex social and cultural

2:21

kind of customs around it And of

2:23

course, how we feed our babies is embedded

2:25

in social history and cultural history.

2:27

And I think that we do parents that are service

2:30

by presenting it as something. Completely

2:32

a historical that sort of happens in a

2:34

vacuum. And I think that's something that

2:36

your book really illustrates. The

2:38

fact that this is so embedded in in social

2:41

history and cultural history. What you show

2:43

in your book is how breastfeeding it

2:45

can illuminate some broader historical trends

2:47

really, can't it? Can you give us some examples?

2:50

Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know,

2:52

how we feed our babies, how we think about

2:54

the breast and breast milk connects

2:57

so much to how we think about womanhood, to how

2:59

we think about motherhood. So

3:02

we we have this certainly in

3:04

the west student history and that I primarily

3:07

look at in a book, we could start thinking

3:09

about the the idea of womanhood from classical

3:12

antique opportunity, right, to the idea that

3:14

women is closer to nature versus

3:16

the kind of cultural intellect of the male

3:18

that they're somehow a slightly lower state. More

3:21

animal, more unruly, more messy.

3:23

Women's bodies are somehow kind of uncontrollable

3:26

and and and all of that. And that's

3:28

an idea that persists and

3:30

carries on in various different ways. At

3:32

the same time, though, we also see at that

3:34

moment in history that breastfeeding, is

3:37

deeply embedded in mythology. It's

3:40

part of the creation story with the the story

3:42

of the the creation of the Milky Way coming from

3:44

a goddess' milk, from Harrah's milk,

3:47

And it's also becomes associated

3:49

with ideas of charity as well

3:51

with classical stories of of the virtuous

3:53

daughter feeding her father. So

3:56

what we start to see is this really kind of confused

3:58

and actually contradictory sense

4:00

of of what breastfeeding is

4:02

that then changes as ideas about

4:05

female sexuality changes. So

4:08

if we think about kind of sexuality and

4:10

breastfeeding in Elizabeth in England,

4:13

For example, female sexual pleasure

4:15

is quite important as a part of reproduction.

4:18

That idea then goes away and changes,

4:20

and so it's less about kind of the

4:22

female pleasure that's biologically important.

4:26

It becomes more about a sort of

4:28

a sentimental turnal

4:30

idea of womanhood and of of motherhood

4:33

that was women take pleasure

4:35

in breastfeeding because it's good and natural

4:38

And what can you tell us about medical understandings

4:40

of breastfeeding over time and how they have

4:42

played into these cultural ideas

4:45

too? Well, I mean, obviously

4:47

for much of history, there were really

4:49

no other real viable alternatives

4:51

to breast milk. There are times

4:54

in history and in certain places and certain

4:56

moments where we see really no cultures

4:58

of breastfeeding, where infants

5:00

are fed animal milk. But those tend

5:02

to be very, very isolated, tend

5:04

to be places that are very, very cold, so there

5:06

would be less issues with animal milks.

5:08

Spoiling and less issues around disease

5:11

and so forth. But of course, for much of history,

5:14

there's been no real alternative to

5:16

breast milk. What does

5:18

change though is our actual understanding of what

5:20

breast milk is. And one of

5:22

the things I was really

5:25

surprised but also unsurprised to

5:27

learn was that,

5:30

certainly, in the west, For

5:32

much of history, breast milk has been thought of

5:34

as menstrual blood, kind of menstrual blood

5:36

that travels from the uterus through

5:38

a special vein. And as it passes the heart,

5:41

it goes from red to white,

5:43

and then it becomes milk. And that

5:45

kind of makes sense in the fact that if you're

5:48

a new mother, if you're lactating, you're

5:50

probably you don't have menstrual blood. There's

5:53

a kind of logic to it, I suppose. That

5:55

also fed into why breast milk was

5:57

also seen as a bit sweet mission. You

5:59

know, it's a questionable feminine

6:01

bodily fluid. And it's only very

6:04

very recently that our understanding of breast

6:06

milk has

6:06

changed. It's really only in the last twentieth,

6:09

but real scientific research has

6:12

looked at what goes into breast

6:14

milk. It's something that for much of history

6:16

has been so so neglected. You

6:19

spoke about animal milk and something that you

6:21

mentioned in your book. I wonder if you could just share

6:23

with us. Is concerns about

6:25

animal milk and the impact that that might have

6:28

on a

6:28

child. There are concerns

6:30

in history around the use of animal

6:32

milk that somehow the

6:34

the milk would transmit animal like

6:37

qualities that you would take on, you know, the

6:39

unintelligence of a dog

6:41

cake, for example, Interestingly,

6:43

those fears around cotagliflozin

6:46

and transmission through milk also

6:49

apply to women's milk.

6:51

With wetness and

6:53

making sure that you choose the right kind of

6:55

wetness is

6:56

very, very important to make sure you're transmitting

6:58

the right kind of moral traits

7:01

through the milk to the baby. Alongside

7:03

animal milk, there have been other alternatives

7:05

to breast

7:06

milk. I wonder if you could speak about a couple of

7:08

those. Yes. So, Pat,

7:11

so any any listeners familiar with kind

7:13

of, you know, the early modern period will have come

7:15

across the idea of what Pat is probably

7:17

it's it's usually some sort of bread

7:19

mixed with mixed with maybe sweet beer

7:22

or something kind of sweetened with honey, a

7:24

kind of very precursor to

7:26

to formula. Sometimes, PAP

7:28

was an attempt to solve

7:31

the problem of disease transmission

7:33

between wetness and infant So

7:35

for example, in the fifteen hundreds,

7:37

in France, syphilis was rife

7:40

and being fed by a wetness, obviously,

7:42

risk infection to the baby. And in that

7:44

instance, sometimes animals were directly used

7:47

to feed the baby. So babies would directly

7:49

suckle from a goat, for example, The

7:51

same kind of thing happened then in the eighteenth

7:53

century where there was the problem

7:55

with babies who might be infected with syphilis,

7:58

might then pass it onto the wetness. And

8:00

so PAP was was advocated

8:02

to solve that potential problem. And then, of

8:05

course, by the nineteenth century, we start to see

8:07

chemists try to replicate

8:10

human milk and to create what we now

8:12

call formula milk. And that was in

8:14

response to high infant

8:17

mortality with infants being

8:19

fed perhaps a solution to to

8:21

attempt to solve the problem of using

8:24

unposturized animal milk. And so

8:26

that's where we start to see the development of

8:28

infant

8:29

formula. So you mentioned wet

8:31

nursing there and that's a really fascinating

8:33

part of this story. What can the history

8:35

of wet nursing tell us about ideas

8:37

about class and femininity through

8:40

history?

8:41

Yeah. Wet nursing reveals so

8:44

so much. Obviously, it would have originated out

8:46

of need before it became

8:48

a more established practice with different customs.

8:51

It can tell us about practices of

8:53

weaning because we can there's so much

8:55

documentation attached to wet nursing

8:57

historically. So we get a picture

9:00

of childhood infancy because

9:02

we have legal documentation and contracts

9:05

and and so on and so forth. It tells

9:07

us about the imagined intimate

9:09

connections between mother and child.

9:11

For example, in Egypt, wetnesses

9:14

for royal babies. Their connection

9:16

to royalty was such that

9:19

the wetness is own biological children

9:21

could call themselves the milkkin

9:24

of the king. That's also true

9:26

in other sort of cultures as well where there's

9:29

a kind of milky relationship between

9:32

children who were genetically unrelated, but

9:34

who shared a wetness. And so there'd be various

9:36

kind of prohibitions against getting

9:38

married and things like that. In some

9:40

British cultures, the wetness is real

9:42

symbol of generosity, and

9:45

they tend to have they tend to be quite high

9:48

status because of that. Elsewhere,

9:51

for example, in classical antiquity, often

9:53

wealthy families employed wet nurses, and they

9:55

were slaves. They, you know, they weren't employed.

9:57

They were they were enslaved. Throughout

10:00

all of these examples, though, there is an idea

10:02

that you have to be very careful when you're

10:04

selecting a kind of woman to wetness

10:07

in terms of her physical attributes, her

10:09

moral characteristics. There's usually

10:12

a prohibition when you look at the contracts

10:14

against the wetness having sexual relations

10:17

because it's believed that will sour the milk.

10:19

Within Europe, wet nursing

10:22

was popular amongst Aristocratic families. For

10:24

a number of reasons. One of

10:27

those is that lactation can

10:29

impact your fertility. And so if

10:31

you want to have lots of babies in quick succession

10:33

and produce a lot of air, then

10:36

you don't want to be lactated. You want

10:38

to get back to your fertility. There was also,

10:40

you know, it's also about maintaining and active

10:42

figure and being sexually available for

10:44

your husband. But the idea

10:48

of wet nursing, even the idea

10:50

of maintaining your attractive

10:52

figure becomes reversed in Western

10:55

Europe in the late late eighteenth century.

10:57

And suddenly, we have male physicians and

11:00

male writers talking about how

11:02

the most attractive thing actually is to see

11:05

a maternal woman, your maternal wife,

11:07

blissfully, breastfeeding. We

11:09

start to see that maternal

11:12

breastfeeding is is

11:14

promoted most famously by

11:16

Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosopher who

11:19

sees that biological mothers

11:22

need to feed their own children,

11:24

not just for the benefit of the child,

11:27

but also for the benefit of civilization,

11:29

for the benefit of mankind. He says

11:31

that when mothers nurse their own children,

11:33

there will be a reform in morals. Natural

11:36

feeling will revive in every heart.

11:39

When women become good mothers, men

11:41

will be good husbands and fathers. In

11:43

the late eighteenth century, he publishes a text

11:45

a meal, which was widely read,

11:48

which really promotes this idea

11:50

of aristocratic and wealthy women and

11:52

middle class women breastfeeding their own children,

11:54

and that will have benefits for the

11:56

state as well as as for the individual

11:59

children. I should say that Russo did put

12:01

his own babies into a foundling hospital,

12:03

so his own babies were not fed by their

12:05

own mother. But he was certainly

12:07

very important in this construction of a maternal

12:10

ideal of the good idealized

12:12

breastfeeding mother. And Russo is

12:15

interesting, isn't he? Because it's really this moment

12:17

of the watershed of changing

12:19

ideas about parenthood, infancy

12:23

and that relationship between parents

12:25

and children. How do you think

12:27

that their story of breastfeeding has been

12:29

changed by attitudes

12:32

towards parenthood in a kind of broader

12:34

sense?

12:35

Yeah. I mean, it's deeply connected to

12:37

ideas of parenthood, to ideas of how we relate

12:39

to our children. Shown. I mean, if we look

12:42

at the early twentieth century with this idea

12:44

of kind of scientific motherhood, it's

12:46

all about feeding by the clock

12:48

and making sure you can

12:50

kind of quantify the amount that you're feeding

12:53

your baby. All of this maternal

12:55

work will contribute

12:58

to a child who is who is not

13:00

only healthy, but who

13:02

can also contribute positively to

13:04

society. And then throughout

13:06

the twentieth century, you kind of see almost this swing

13:08

back to this point that now we

13:10

have other theories of parenting where it's all about

13:12

attachment and it's all about a move

13:14

towards a more natural and I use

13:17

inverted commas because the idea of

13:19

nature is something that can be constructed

13:21

and employed in different

13:22

ways. But yes, all of

13:24

all of this feeds into how we think

13:26

about how we feed our babies and the pressure that

13:29

is put on mothers primarily in

13:31

their role. And of course,

13:33

as you mentioned at the beginning of this

13:35

podcast, breastfeeding isn't easy

13:37

or possible for all women. So what have

13:39

some of the alternatives that have been available

13:42

been over time. For most

13:44

of history, babies would have been fed

13:46

by other other women, but one

13:49

of the things that I was really surprised to

13:51

find when I started doing the research for

13:53

the book were really early examples

13:55

of baby bottles. And

13:57

some of the earliest are kind of over seven

13:59

thousand years old, you know, these were some

14:02

of the first ones that that I came across.

14:04

I I was so surprised that these weren't just

14:06

a a kind of modern invention or a Victorian

14:09

invention. It's doubtful that they would

14:11

have been used to feed newborn babies. But

14:13

certainly they would have been used as part

14:15

of a perhaps a weaning

14:18

process with older infants. Perhaps

14:20

to help her mother's fertility return

14:22

for other reasons. And

14:25

it also points, I think, to how neglected

14:27

this history is. And that was the other

14:29

reason I wanted to pull together so many

14:31

historical fragments in the book because

14:34

I felt that generally there is so

14:36

much history there and so much of it

14:38

has been neglected. And

14:41

again, it's only very, very recently that

14:43

these bottles have

14:45

been looked at from the point of view

14:48

of telling us something about an maternal

14:50

history. For a long time, for example

14:52

bottles found in Roman and Greek

14:54

archaeological hood eggs that we now know

14:56

at infant feeding vessels were thought to be

14:59

maybe oil lamps or some kind of other thing.

15:01

The idea of interpreting this

15:03

data with a view to the kind of feminine

15:06

history. It just it just didn't happen.

15:08

And so Analysis

15:10

done on these bronze age bottles show

15:13

that they did have animal milk in them.

15:15

So babies were being fed animal milk or

15:17

maternal human milk. So

15:19

women were expressing milk to to feed

15:22

these babies. And these bottles are so beautifully

15:24

made. I mean, some are quite simple, but some are

15:27

shaped into to sort of animal

15:29

shapes like a deer or a rabbit,

15:31

and they're beautifully decorated. And

15:33

I think I think that speaks a lot about

15:36

kind of some of the universal aspects

15:38

of of

15:39

parenthood, you know, the care and attention

15:41

that were put into these. And by the nineteenth

15:43

century, these bottles had become more

15:45

industrialized, but they'd also

15:48

become quite potentially dangerous, hadn't

15:50

they? They had So

15:53

you get variation in the kind of designs

15:55

of the bottles at this point. You

15:57

have ones that are made, for example, of glass

15:59

with a very long rubber tube. And

16:01

the idea is that the the infant can kind of

16:04

feed themselves. It liberates the

16:06

the parent completely from having to feed

16:08

the child. The problem, of course, was

16:10

of hygiene and of bacteria without

16:13

adequate sanitization, without

16:15

sterilizing, without pasteurization

16:18

of the milk. They were consuming. Bacteria

16:20

just ran rife and unfortunately resulted

16:23

in horrible numbers of children perishing

16:26

because the bottles were unsafe. And

16:28

even even the advice given to parents

16:30

in in kind of infant manuals

16:32

is, you know, to wash the leather

16:34

tea. You know, oh, you only have to wash it every few

16:37

weeks. You know, so you can imagine just

16:39

how awful they became, how unhygienic

16:42

they

16:43

were. Something that I think we need

16:45

to touch on, which is a central tenet of

16:47

your book really is what you call the

16:49

politics of milk. What

16:51

do you mean by

16:52

that? And how is it played out over time?

16:54

Well, I think all of this is political.

16:57

I think there is a politics to

16:59

how we think about breast milk. It's

17:01

about how we think about female bodies.

17:03

And how those bodies have been thought of throughout

17:06

time. One thing that

17:08

really struck me was how

17:12

there is so much debate still, you know, certainly

17:14

within the UK where public breastfeeding

17:16

is enshrined in law. There is

17:18

still debate about whether

17:20

or not it's acceptable to feed in public and so

17:22

on and so

17:22

on. And there is a politics

17:24

to this, which I think extends out beyond

17:26

milk and beyond breastfeeding. That

17:29

question of breastfeeding in public, from

17:31

what you found in your

17:32

research, is that a fairly modern thing or does

17:34

it have historical precedents? I

17:37

mean, it varies in time and place in

17:39

terms of how the ideas of public and private

17:41

change over time. It's certainly

17:43

not something that is exclusively a

17:45

kind of modern phenomenon. There would

17:47

have been periods in history where women, where,

17:50

you know, domestic spaces were separate, you

17:52

would have a husband's chamber in the space for the

17:54

women of household to be. Certainly

17:56

in early modern England breastfeeding,

17:58

you know, for most people would have been something that was

18:00

very very visible and very very seen in in

18:03

many parts of the world breastfeeding is something

18:05

that would have been seen and would have been

18:06

visible. So in some ways, it is a modern

18:08

construction. But again, it's

18:11

it's context dependent. So

18:13

of course, you're approaching this as

18:15

as somebody who has experienced this yourself,

18:17

but you're also approaching it as an art his story

18:20

in, and you look at depictions of

18:22

breastfeeding throughout history

18:25

in your book. What are some of the main tropes

18:27

that you found in images of breastfeeding

18:30

over time?

18:31

Well, I mean, the idea of the

18:33

mother archetype is strong. Right?

18:35

The mother goddess throughout history

18:38

in various places across the world. It's

18:40

a vast, vast history. I

18:42

think for me

18:45

growing up, not religious, but in the UK,

18:47

before I had a child, if I was to picture

18:49

breastfeeding, I would picture soft

18:52

focus, halo light, a

18:54

seated mother holding a baby in cradle

18:56

pose, perhaps a halo, drapery,

18:59

the very you know, the renaissance depiction of

19:02

the Virgin Feeding Christ. Breastfeeding

19:05

depictions date back far

19:07

far earlier as examples from the Indus

19:09

Valley Civilizations which are at five

19:11

thousand years old. But for me, that

19:14

endure, you know, the image I came to motherhood

19:16

with probably, you know, was was the image

19:18

of of the Virgin Mary. There's

19:20

changes to how even she is represented during

19:23

the renaissance. So

19:25

the depictions that we

19:27

have of the breastfeeding medona that start

19:29

to emerge during the renaissance, it's

19:32

really about making her more relatable

19:34

and accessible, trying to encourage women

19:37

to feed their own babies rather

19:39

than use a wet nurse, So we start

19:41

to see representations of the bare

19:44

breast of the virgin. That

19:46

then also then changes because you have the problem

19:48

of nudity how do you separate

19:50

the maternal breast from the erotic breast?

19:54

Sometimes that was done through

19:56

through the kind of the framing of the image through using

19:58

gold or whatever to frame the image in

20:00

a more sacred way. Sometimes the breast was

20:02

partially covered. I was looking at terracotta. The

20:05

other day, which has traces

20:07

in it of holes where they would've actually used real

20:10

textile to to cover the bed

20:12

rest and the the the genitals of Christ

20:14

in the renaissance. Often one strategy

20:16

was to have a very detached and

20:18

fake looking breast. So you see the madonna

20:21

and her breast is somewhere up on her shoulder.

20:23

It's it's a way of to get from her body

20:25

to take away any any kind of problematic

20:27

questions about showing showing abreast

20:30

within a few decades by the early fifteenth

20:32

century tree, there was a real shift towards

20:34

naturalism and the

20:36

demand that the body would be more

20:38

anatomically correct. And then

20:41

we start to see depictions of of

20:43

the virgin breastfeeding start to kind of disappear

20:45

because there was no way to to solve

20:47

that problem of of how you can depict

20:49

that. You know, the unsolvable problem

20:52

of the nudity, the nudity of

20:54

it. Even that just snapshot of a couple of

20:56

centuries in Italy is just it just

20:58

reveals so much about how quickly

21:00

ideas can

21:01

change. And finally, is

21:03

there anything that you learn in your research

21:05

about the history of breastfeeding?

21:07

That really surprised you that you think is

21:09

worth sharing with All listeners. So

21:12

much so much surprised me. The first

21:14

thing that really surprised me was when I came across Victorian

21:16

nickel shields and kind of discovered

21:19

that firstly they were made of things like tin.

21:21

That was my first surprise in that

21:23

I realized that actually women have been mitigating

21:26

problems for far longer than

21:28

I had imagined. I think also

21:31

the other thing which I think I hope

21:33

comes during the book is that we

21:36

throughout history, there's been situations where

21:39

the ideal that is

21:41

presented for motherhood often

21:44

butts up against the social and

21:46

the economic realities for women.

21:48

So when we talk about Russo

21:51

and his appeal to women, to

21:54

breastfeed the way that there was

21:56

so much infrastructure put in place

21:58

to sell this idea to women to promote this

22:00

idea of maternal breastfeeding.

22:03

Yet at the same time, there was

22:06

such a fast wet nursing industry.

22:08

So one of the things that surprised me most

22:10

was that in Paris, in sort of the

22:13

late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, so

22:15

many babies were being sent to

22:17

be nurse in the countryside. So

22:20

at the same time that we have people reading

22:22

Russo and reading a meal, I

22:24

think in in in seventeen eighty, only

22:26

one thousand babies were

22:29

nursed by their own mothers in Paris

22:31

that year, whereas about

22:33

twenty thousand babies born in that same year

22:35

were taken out to the countryside. Sent

22:37

out to be wetness. And the reason

22:39

for that is that parents wanted

22:41

their children to be breastfed. You know,

22:43

they wanted their children to have the breast milk

22:45

but it wasn't economically viable for

22:49

women living in Paris with high

22:51

rent, you know, working,

22:53

it wasn't viable for them to feed their own

22:56

babies. It made more economic sense for them

22:58

to pay somebody else to do it for them

23:00

because women were increasingly working in the

23:02

new factory trees in the shops, so on and so

23:04

forth. So they had to outsource the

23:07

feeding of their babies in rural

23:09

communities. So as

23:11

the fashions changed and upper class

23:13

women were starting to feed their

23:15

own babies, working women,

23:18

middle class women, we're having to use

23:20

wet nurses. And that surprised

23:22

me so much. It's a real small snapshot

23:24

in history. There's so much visual beautiful

23:26

visual culture around it and heartbreaking visual

23:28

culture around it. But I found that

23:30

so so surprising.

23:37

That was Joanna Wolff. Her

23:39

book, Milk, an intimate history

23:41

of breastfeeding, is available now

23:44

published by Orion. Thanks for listening

23:46

to the History Extra Podcast. This

23:48

podcast was produced by Daniel

23:51

Kramer Ardent.