Kia Nurse Quotes

In practice, the wet nurses did not have to be free women or of Christian upbringing; it was enough if they were fair-skinned, like the slaves from the east. 15 The idea that it could be otherwise, that breastfeeding was close to a mother’s heart and important for the child’s development, was professed by Renaissance philosophers such as Leon Battista Alberti, and later Erasmus of Rotterdam and Michel de Montaigne, who were looking back to Plutarch and other writers from classical antiquity.

It was easier for the nobility, who had their children nursed at home. Many of them could afford to buy female slaves as domestic servants. These were Tartar, Bulgarian, Russian, Mongolian, or Greek women who were kidnapped and sold in seafaring cities. Many of the men of the house subjected these women to brutal sexual exploitation, sent the children they had together to the orphanage, and then demanded that the slaves should breastfeed the legitimate offspring in the home.

Lisa’s children were cared for by nurses, and the household also included a number of women whom Francesco had bought as slaves after they had been kidnapped in distant countries. He had so many of them baptized in Florence that he might have been suspected of trading in people as well as fabrics. 8

The majority of prosperous Florentine women did not breastfeed at all. Instead, their husbands made agreements with the spouses of the wet nurses who took over this task. Fathers were concerned that their wives’ milk might be polluted by having sex and, above all, by a new pregnancy. They wished however to become fathers again soon, as having several children increased their chances of having future heirs. It was important for men’s social status to have many legitimate offspring, whereas an intimate mother–child relationship in early years seemed to many of them to be of secondary importance. The rich fathers expected the parents of poorer families to abstain from sexual intercourse and inform them immediately if the wet nurse got pregnant again, which would result in the termination of the agreement.

The economic pressure on the families of the wet nurses was so great that many of them entrusted their own newborns to an even poorer wet nurse or gave them away to the Foundling Hospital in Florence that was opened in 1445. A merchant’s wife from Prato who arranged wet nurses for the newborns of wealthy families cruelly boasted that she had forced a woman to promise to become wet nurse to a strange child on the very night that her own baby had died. 14