Research Catalog

Title

A social history of wet nursing in America : from breast to bottle / Janet Golden.

Author

Golden, Janet Lynne, 1951-

Publication

Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

xiii, 215 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

• A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle examines the intersection of medical science, social theory, and cultural practices as they shaped relations among wet nurses, physicians, and families from the colonial period through the twentieth century.
• It explores how Americans used wet nursing to solve infant-feeding problems in the eighteenth century, shows why wet nursing became controversial in the nineteenth century as motherhood slowly became medicalized, and elaborates how the development of scientific infant feeding eliminated wet nursing by the beginning of the twentieth century.
• Setting these changes in the context of women's history and the history of medicine, the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the cultural authority of medical science, the role of physicians in shaping child-rearing practices, the social construction of motherhood, and the profound dilemmas of class and culture that played out in the private space of the nursery.

Series Statement

Cambridge history of medicine

Uniform Title

Cambridge history of medicine.

Subject

• Wet nurses > United States > History
• Motherhood > United States > History
• Infants > Nutrition > History. > United States
• Breastfeeding > United States > History
• Physician and patient > United States > History
• Mother-Child Relations > history
• Infant > history
• Nutritional Physiological Phenomena
• Breast Feeding > history
• Physician-Patient Relations
• United States

Note

• Includes index.

Contents

1. Public discourse and private relations: Wet nursing in colonial America -- 2. The new motherhood and the new view of wet nurses, 1780-1865 -- 3. Finding "just the right kind of woman": The urban wet nurse marketplace, 1830-1900 -- 4. "Victims of distressing circumstances": The wet nurse labor force and the offspring of wet nurses, 1860-1910 -- 5. Medical oversight and medical dilemmas: The physician and the wet nurse, 1870-1910 -- 6. "Obliged to have wet nurses": Relations in the private household, 1870-1925 -- 7. "Therapeutic merchandise": Human milk in the twentieth century -- Epilogue: From commodity to gift.

ISBN

052149544X (hc)

LCCN

95022149

OCLC

• 32665906
• ocm32665906
• SCSB-8877368

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries