Breastfeeding Their Own Children, and the Children of Their Owners
Enslaved mothers all over the Americas breastfed their own children and occasionally the babies of other enslaved women. Slave owners also employed nursing bondswomen to breastfeed their newborns.
On plantations in the southern colonies of British North America, white women were more likely to nurse their own babies during the eighteenth century.21 In the nineteenth-century US South, however, observers at that time reported that white mistresses also used their bondswomen to suckle their newborns.22 In any event, the presence of enslaved nannies in Southern households is well documented in written records and existing visual images such as daguerreotypes (figures 12.3 and 12.4) featuring these bondswomen, whose ages and names we do not know, posing with their owners and the owners’ children. In Jamaica, white elite women used white wet nurses to suckle their babies in the early nineteenth century. But white mothers of lower and middle classes either nursed their own children or employed enslaved women as wet nurses.23 In Brazil and the United States, several justifications motivated white women to delegate breastfeeding to enslaved women, including the widespread belief that elite white women produced weak milk, the white women’s weak health, and even the simple fact that nursing was an exhausting and boring task.24
Figure 12.3. Thomas Martin Easterly, Father, Daughters, and Nurse, c. 1850. Daguerreotype, hand-colored, 213/16 Ă— 3½ inches, 84.XT.1569.1. Courtesy of Jean Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Slave owners also used bondswomen as wet nurses in the Spanish Americas and later in independent countries of Latin America.
Michelle McKinley explains that the use of Black enslaved wet nurses to suckle white children in colonial Peru “illustrates the split logic of property most sharply, since legally the mother’s milk belonged to her owner and not to her child.”25 In Brazil and in the United States, slaveholding families sought to use their own enslaved women to breastfeed their infants. But when no bondswoman was available to perform this demanding task in the household, slaveholding families either purchased or rented the services of an enslaved wet nurse. Between 1800 and 1865, thousands of advertisements sought wet nurses in dozens of newspapers in several regions of the United States, whereas many other ads also announced enslaved wet nurses for sale. Moreover, when the internal slave trade intensified in the decades preceding the Civil War, the market for enslaved wet nurses increased. White women actively sought to purchase enslaved wet nurses and clearly valued their work.26 But whereas enslaved mothers were forced to breastfeed their owners’ newborns, they had to use a bottle to nurse their own babies.27
Figure 12.4. Unknown maker, Portrait of a Nurse and a Child, c. 1850. Daguerreotype, hand-colored, 27/16 Ă— 17/8 inches. 84.XT.172.4. Courtesy of Jean Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
As in the United States (and as discussed in chapter 8), Brazilian newspapers regularly displayed advertisements either offering or seeking enslaved wet nurses for rent or purchase. Many enslaved wet nurses were young mothers, between eighteen and twenty years of age, who were sold with their babies.28 But some ads described enslaved wet nurses as childless and of “first pregnancy,” suggesting that although their babies did not survive, they could still breastfeed.29 Ads offering for sale and rent grieving mothers who lost a newborn and whose breasts were still full of milk shows how slave owners subjected bondswomen to extreme physical and psychological exploitation in a society in which infant mortality was particularly high, especially among enslaved children.30
French traveler Charles Expilly, who sojourned in Brazil during the nineteenth century, observed that owning a wet nurse was also a marker of social status in Brazilian slaveholding families.
Because wet nurses were in constant contact with slave owners, they were usually offered better working and living conditions than other enslaved women who performed domestic service. Their social status is confirmed by the existence of early photographic portraits of enslaved wet nurses and nannies holding the babies of their owners in their arms. One of these portraits (figure 12.5) features a young enslaved nanny. Sitting on a chair, and seen from profile, she is holding a white baby. As the daguerreotype is blurred and scratched, both sitters seem to be a ghost of the past. As for many enslaved sitters, her name remains unknown to this day. But we do know she was associated with the family of a British merchant, Alfred Phillips Youle, who lived in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, in the middle of the nineteenth century and whose wife, Annie Stewart Schwind, belonged to a Liverpool family deeply involved in the trade of enslaved Africans. What was the sitter’s name? How old was she? Was Youle her owner? Was she ever manumitted? These answers are unknown, but because her image was captured in a daguerreotype, we can assume she was well regarded. Even though we do not know who she was, she was immortalized in this intimate portrait that feature her large eyes calmly looking at the camera while taking care of the white baby.
Figure 12.5. Charles DeForest Fredricks, Black Woman Shown Seated in 3/4 View. Daguerreotype, 7 Ă— 9 inches. Collection Portraits of a British Merchant Family in Brazil, D2. Courtesy of Getty Research Institute Special Collections, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Slave owners held enslaved wet nurses in high regard for their potential utility, which is why they were usually provided better clothes and a healthier diet. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the increasing influence of pseudoscientific racist theories in Brazil led physicians to condemn the use of Black wet nurses to breastfeed white newborns.
Using the derogatory term “mercenary nursing,” they claimed Black wet nurses transmitted through their milk a variety of diseases and contributed to physically and morally degenerate Brazilian families.31 One physician criticized mothers of Rio de Janeiro’s high society who refused to breastfeed their own children and instead delivered their babies to enslaved wet nurses who were forced to neglect and even abandon their own children.32Although wet nurses did not provide heavy manual labor in the fields, breastfeeding their own babies and their owners’ newborns was a very painful and arduous job. Such imposed choices could lead to tragedy. Consider the case of the Brazilian-born enslaved woman Ambrosina, explored by historian Maria Helena Machado. Ambrosina lived and worked in the house of a municipal judge in the town of Mogi Mirim in the ParaĂba Valley coffee plantation region. In 1886, two years before the abolition of slavery in Brazil, she gave birth to a baby boy, who according to the Rio Branco Law (Free Womb) of 1871 was a free womb captive who could be totally emancipated once he reached twenty-one years of age. That same year, Ambrosina’s owners also welcomed a newborn. Both the Black and the white newborns were named Benedito. As expected, the new enslaved mother became the white baby’s wet nurse. But because Ambrosina’s mistress was ill, her husband decided to move to TaubatĂ©, nearly 140 miles away, to temporarily live with his mother and brother. He brought with him his newborn, an enslaved nanny, Ambrosina, and her own baby.
This relocation removed the wet nurse from her environment and distanced her from her parents. Yet her owner agreed that he would soon find another wet nurse to replace her, allowing her to return to Mogi Mirim, where her family lived. But he failed to fulfill the agreement. Weeks later, Ambrosina was still in Taubaté, lodged in a small room shared with a nanny and her owner’s baby, where she slept on the floor with her own son. Exhausted from being far from her family while breastfeeding two babies day and night, one night Ambrosina used a ragdoll to make the white Benedito stop crying. The newborn suffocated and died. Accused of killing the baby, Ambrosina was arrested. But the jury eventually acquitted her for lack of evidence. Existing records do not allow us to know if the Black Benedito survived his enslaved mother’s ordeal.33 Ambrosina’s story ultimately shows how enslaved mothers who were forced to nurse the children of their owners had to neglect their own children, while also risking their own lives if something went wrong when taking care of white people’s offspring.