COMMENTARY

When wet-nursing was the fashion

Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO / WHAT OTHERS SAY
Publication Date: 8/11/2005

There are newspaper articles, and there are newspaper articles. A writer in the Sunday Telegraph floored me with one such item. 

Charlotte Edwardes had just had her baby a few months back when she went visiting her friend, Miele Adler, in California.

Miele took Margot, Charlotte's daughter, off her and told her to go and sleep, she would "look after" her. An hour later, Charlotte's husband burst into the room where she was sleeping, all panic and looking like he had seen a ghost.

"Miele is breast-feeding Margot", he said all shaken.

"Is that all right?", Charlotte asked her hubby in what she says was an urgent voice.

"I don't know," he said. "You tell me. Is it?"

Charlotte realised that nothing, in theory, or in real life, had prepared her to deal with another woman breast-feeding her baby. Her instincts told her it was wrong; disgusting and perverted. Many modern women feel the same way, but is it?

When Charlotte was reunited with Margot, the baby was full and sleeping contentedly, so at least we know where the little one stands on the issue.

Turns out there was a time when "wet nursing", as they call it, was quite common, and several eminent books have been written exploring the practice. 

One of them by an expert on Victorian domestic life reveals that almost all upper-class women and about a third of middle-class mothers employed wet nurses in the 1850s.

Another wrote the definitive guidebook, detailing what qualities to look for in a wet nurse: "[Their] breasts should be round and elastic. The nipple erectile and firm". 

Which gives the game away: The writer was male.

Wet nursing was prevalent because some mothers didn't have breast milk – and formula hadn't yet been invented. Others were fashion-conscious and feared breastfeeding would pull their breasts of out shape.

Returning from a survey of wet-nursing in various parts of the world, Charlotte, herself now a little more open-minded than when her husband reported Miele's trespass, sums up matters with the bold views of Lynn Walcott, of the Radical Midwives Association in the UK. 

For Walcott, the revulsion against wet-nursing is symptomatic of modern society's confused beliefs. "It's the modern mindset. The idea of accepting another's bodily fluids is offensive," Walcott said.

"I always find it amazing that people find it disgusting for a baby to suckle breast milk from another human but are happy to feed them milk from another animal [cow] entirely". Try and throw a handbag at that argument if you can.

While we are on about feeding children, The Irish Independent reports that daily tantrums by children who won't eat their bread in the morning could soon become a thing of the past in Ireland when the crust-free loaf goes on sale there shortly.

This bread is baked at a lower temperature than normal in order to prevent its outside from hardening.

The soft-edged loaf, described by its makers as a "world first" because of its new baking process, comes in response to demands from children and to findings that show that 45 per cent of bread (the most nutritious bits) is wasted in discarding the crusts. Research showed that 35 per cent of mothers cut bread crusts off for their children.

The crust-less loaf has already been introduced in Britain and, we learn, has been the subject of debate between traditional bakers and dieticians.

The National Association of Master Bakers, which represents the traditional loaf-makers, believes it is an "accountant's loaf" and is "dumbing down" the taste of children by "pandering to their minor quibbles".

One innovation in, another one bites the dust. On Monday, the giant high street store, Dixons, announced that it had stopped stocking the 35mm camera film, and was in fact phasing out film altogether. 

Dixons said the decision was a particularly sad one as the retail chain had been built on the growth of home photography which, until the last decade, had been dominated by 35mm film.

Millions of consumers have turned their backs on film, though, in favour of the ease of use and instant results of digital cameras.

So, like the gramophone, the typewriter and video recorder, film photography has been sunk by the digital revolution. The only thing that seems secure is crunchy bread. Doesn't matter whether they make it with or without the crust; we shall toast it!

And who else but Prince Charles should be fighting not to lose something dear. The Sunday Telegraph reports that while style-watchers have had their eyes on the Duchess of Cornwall (otherwise better known to us ordinary folk as Camilla) since their wedding early this year, they have over-looked what the paper calls a "startling change in the appearance of the Prince of Wales. His hair, which was grey and thin, has become startlingly dark and lustrous".

His staff are refusing to comment, but the Telegraph says the king-in-waiting has had what they call a "weave" – something that many African and African-American women are quite familiar with.

The paper says that if the prince has, indeed, decided to employ a weave, then he will be the first member of the royal family to resort to such a drastic measure since his ancestors favoured powdered wigs two centuries ago.

Prince Charles has always had a bad press in a world that was besotted by his dashing and charismatic former wife Princess Diana, and which somehow blames him for her death. In all his tribulations, I have always been either neutral, or on his side. On this one, though, he has me puzzled. 

We know that older men who marry younger beautiful women can sometimes do crazy things to look youthful. Prince Charles is among the few men who has gone for a young look after marrying an older woman. Camilla is 57, a year older than him. Maybe it is what advancing age does to us.

If, like me, you didn't know, breathing is usually controlled by a "command post" in our brains which ensures that it proceeds unconsciously during wakefulness and sleep. Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, report that the elderly tend to die suddenly in their sleep because their brains forget to tell their bodies to breathe!

Mr Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group's managing editor for Convergence and New Products

 

 


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