MOTHERING
For some historians as well as contemporary observers, the ‘natural mother’ was also a selfish, irresponsible or uncaring mother. In a provocative analysis of the maternal instinct, the French sociologist Elizabeth Badinter argues that high levels of wet-nursing, child abandonment and infant death in the eighteenth century point to a time when a child was commonly viewed as ‘a nuisance or even a misfortune' and when motherhood was not eulogised or sentimentalised.
The French aristocrat who sent her children to be wet-nursed in the countryside, almost certainly consigning them to an early death, or the Parisian woman who abandoned her child to a foundling hospital, provide evidence of a widespread absence of a maternal instinct which was a nineteenth-century discursive and practical creation designed to subordinate women, restricting their opportunities and choices. Hence Badinter asks the question: ‘What caused the apathetic mother of the eighteenth century to turn into the mother hen of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?'58 Few would disagree with the suggestion that a new ideal of motherhood was held up to women as an emotionally fulfilling duty, but the proposition that earlier child-care practices indicate of an absence of sentiment is misguided.To argue that good mothering was an invention of modernisation indicates a wilful disregard for the social and economic context of child-rearing.59 It is worth examining some of these alleged negligent practices in more detail. Wet-nursing was certainly fashionable amongst upper-class French women for a time in the eighteenth century. Madame Bovary, the heroine of Flaubert's novel of that name, is a prime example of the woman too concerned with appearance and her own amusements to nurse her child, and Rousseau, probably the most well-known promotor of breast-feeding, was contemptuous of mothers who ‘got rid of their babies' to nurses to ‘devote themselves gaily to the pleasures of the town'.60 A number of reasons, some more plausible than others, have been put forward to explain this trend, including pressure from husbands to resume sex with their wives and the belief that intercourse when a woman was breast-feeding would make her milk curdle.
Of course, some women had difficulty nursing their infants and, at a time when alternative methods of feeding were dangerous, recourse to a wet nurse was a practical solution. By the nineteenth century, though, there is evidence to show that even men were taking on board Rousseau's injunctions that mother's breast milk was best. Upon hearing that his daughter was unable to breast-feed, the Englishman Henry Alford wrote to her expressing his disappointment:Not being able to nurse it, is a physical relief to you; but on one account I rather regret it, that you lose the discipline in patience and long-suffering which makes the bloom of the maternal character. A mother who has borne with her infant's thousand wearing and worrying ways, who has given up her employ by day and her rest by night for it for months together, will be likely to bear with its moral faults and exercise patience in disciplining it for Christ, better, perhaps, than one who has been spared all this.61
Working-class women were less likely to follow fashions; their actions were more likely to be in reaction to economic circumstances. Wet nurses were sometimes used by working-class mothers when employment was incompatible with full-time child care.62 Their need was met by poor rural women who were content to breast-feed a stranger’s child for modest wages. However, we also know that unscrupulous individuals known as baby-farmers preyed on unsuspecting poor mothers by offering to provide temporary child care. These women took out insurance on the infants, allowed them to die and then collected the payment. In Britain in the 1870s, the trial of two sisters in London and the subsequent hanging of one, provoked a public furore about the practice.63 Newspapers were full of stories of infants being drugged with opium and starved to death by the baby-farmers, prompting legislation regulating child-care establishments. Only desperate mothers deposited their babies in this way and most were well aware of the potential dangers of wet-nurse care.
They knew that a breast-fed child was healthier and less likely to succumb to the scourge of infants — diarrhoea. By 1900 around three-quarters of mothers breast-fed their babies for up to six months and often longer when times were hard, and it was cheaper to keep an infant at the breast than wean it on to solid foods.64 Bottle-feeding, using dried or condensed milk or cereals mixed with water, was less hazardous by this time if utensils were sterilised but few working-class households had the facilities to keep bottles and teats scrupulously clean. During the cholera epidemic in Hamburg in 1892 mortality rates were highest among infants. In this city, breast-feeding, which conferred a degree of immunity, was not common, and poor mothers customarily diluted milk with tap-water, the main source of infection with the cholera bacillus during the epidemic.65 In such circumstances, recourse to a wet nurse was a sure sign that a mother cared about her child and regarded breast milk, even from another woman, preferable to tainted bottle-milk. The decline of wet-nursing in France after the First World War had more to do with the provision of sterilised milk and the fall in female employment than with the modernisation of mothering.Mothers in the past have been accused by historians of a range of neglectful and downright abusive behaviour towards their children with little basis in fact. Swaddling, the practice of wrapping newborn babies tightly in cloth, has been interpreted as a practice which inhibited the development of an affectionate and emotional relationship between mother and child. This interpretation of a common practice across Europe is plainly wrong. Swaddling, which survived in parts of Europe such as the Balkans, Russia, southern Italy and some areas of France into the twentieth century, was practical: it kept a baby warm and out of danger; and it was believed to aid hardening of the flesh and the strengthening of the limbs and back.66 Similarly the use of comforters or dummies dipped in various narcotic substances has been cited as evidence of bad mothering, but we should be wary of such value judgements which pay little attention to the precise context in which mothers dealt with babies' crying, teething and sleeplessness.
When one mother asked her doctor for help in soothing her teething son he recommended she use chloroform.67The high infant mortality rates which, in some poor urban areas, meant that up to 30 per cent of infants died before the age of 5 years, have been both blamed on mothers' poor care and used to explain so-called tentative mothering, whereby mothers who recognised their child's provisional hold on life withheld emotional attachment until the child was relatively safe.68 These mothers were not callous. Lawrence Stone's comment that the ‘omnipresence of death coloured affective relations at all levels of society by reducing the amount of emotional capital available for prudent investment in any single individual, especially in such ephemeral creatures as infants' is broadly untenable.69 The frequency of infant death might have encouraged a fatalistic attitude towards small babies — it was not uncommon to speak openly of ‘letting them go to heaven to be with the angels' — but for some the ubiquity of infant death did not make it any easier to bear. In 1862, Melesina Trench recorded in her diary the death of two of her children: her newborn daughter and her 2-year-old son. The loss of her daughter was hard but ‘she was merely a little bud; he was a lovely blossom which had safely passed all the earliest dangers, and gave clearest promise of delicious fruit... Oh, my child, my child!... when I saw you cold and motionless before me how came it my heart did not break at once.'70 Indeed, contrary to argument that an infant life was worth little, we know that mothers' attachment to their infants was intense, perhaps even more so in the knowledge that a child's life was so precious. Lullabies sung to infants as they were rocked in their cradles reflect love, hope and concern for the child. In pre-revolutionary Russia, children were much hoped for and dearly treasured, reflected in the words of the lullaby ‘Slumber, Vasen'ka, Slumber beloved, Go to sleep, precious. Sleep dear child, Precious, golden child'.71 In London's poor East End, children were indulged and spoiled ‘being commonly the pride of their mothers, who will sacrifice much to see them prettily dressed'.72 A mother of four, who suffered terribly through each of her pregnancies and who often possessed little money, insufficient nourishment and inadequate housing, commented that she ‘often wondered how the poor little mites managed to live, and perhaps they never would have done but for our adoration, because this constant admiration of our treasures did give them whiffs of fresh air very often'.73