The Tragic Plight of Enslaved Wet Nurses
Edition #26 - How Black mothers were systemically deprived of breastfeeding their own children
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The Tragic Plight of Enslaved Wet Nurses
Since slavery, the dehumanization of black people has been entrenched deeply in the social pyramid. One such is the tragic case of black mothers who were forced to breastfeed their owner’s children at their own expense.
The History of Wet Nursing
Some historians believe that the practice originated in the 1600s when Malaria claimed numerous lives of many white settlers.
The slave owners believed that feeding their babies with milk from their native slaves would provide them natural immunity to Malaria. This had a trickle-down impact on racial and the psychological, financial, and political fabric of the society throughout the Black community.
Eventually, the white mothers considered it below their social status to breastfeed since it was unfashionable. It kept them away from wearing the trendy clothes of yesteryear. Having a wet nurse was seen as a status symbol and symbol of wealth.
Wives of slave owners timed their pregnancies with their slaves and then forcefully separated enslaved new mothers from their infants to serve as wet nurses for their children.
The black mothers were often beaten and milked like cows to feed white babies.
How Wet Nursing Dehumanized the Black Mothers
Many slave owners practiced wet nursing as a form of birth control among enslaved Black people.
In that era, having an ‘heir and a spare’ was common among the wealthy and affluent. Relegating the nursing duties to a black mother freed the white mothers to give birth to the subsequent progeny.
This portrayed the image of a cruel black mother, which was explained by the fact that she often lived separated from her newborns and family.
With slavery and wet nursing, the invaluable breast milk often referred to as ‘liquid gold’ benefited the white children, while cow or goat milk was fed as a substitute to black children. This often resulted in high mortality and susceptibility to diseases in the early childhood of black children.
The Stereotype of Bad Black Mothers
The widespread stereotype of a ‘Bad Black Mother’ justified this practice. It propagated the idea of a mythical Mammy who loved the white children and took them under her care while she cold-heartedly disregarded her own.
The Mammy was also portrayed as a cruel mother who deserted her own children and family for the service of her owners to enjoy the comfort of house labor which was often not available for slaves.
In popular culture, a stereotypical Mammy is marked by extreme feature exaggerations. She is black, tall, and buxom.
She has a loud laugh and tells stories to white children in plantation dialect while faithful to the white family. Besides ‘mammy,’ she usually did not have a name.
Life as a Wet Nurse
While nursing and raising white children did not protect Black women from cruelty, some nurses benefited by escaping the field labor to live in the houses.
The cruelty was, however, perpetuated psychologically. In 1912, a Black nurse living in Georgia described her duties:
I live a treadmill life; and I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets when I am out with the children or when my children come to the ‘yard’ to see me, which isn’t often because my white folks don’t like to see their servants’ children hanging around their premises.
Even in the best of circumstances, wet nursing was brutal and dehumanizing like all slave labor. Wet nursing has existed for many centuries, dating back to the biblical days.
However, in history, only slave mothers were forced into the act.