The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled

An illustrated exploration of an age-old occupation, at once life-giving and freighted with contradictory ideas about women and their bodies. The wet nurse-a woman hired to breastfeed a child not her own-is indeed attested far back in history; in fact, archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen’s wet nurse.In modern Europe and the United States, wet nursing persisted into the early 20th century, when bottles and formula rendered it obsolete.At one end of the social scale, wealthy families hired wet nurses to spare mothers the necessity of nursing; at the other, foundling babies were fed by wet nurses employed by orphanages.In this book, conceived as both a social history and a feminist act of reparation, artist Barbara Zucker uncovers the forgotten-perhaps deliberately buried-occupation of wet nursing.She ranges across eras and cultures, revealing the practices surrounding wet nursing and the social attitudes toward the women who worked as wet nurses, almost always out of f