The Milk of Human Kindness

My mother's mistress was the daughter of my grandmother's mistress. She was the foster sister of my mother; they were both nourished at my grandmother's breast. In fact, my mother had been weaned at three months old, that the babe of the mistress might obtain sufficient food.

-- Harriet Jacobs (writing as Linda Brent), Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Appalachian slave women were trapped by their owners in a vicious cycle of early weaning from breastfeeding, high child mortality, and high fertility. To maximize women's productive labor in the fields or at hired locations, masters required mothers to return to work within a few weeks of childbirth and to begin to wean their babies by the 6th month. Because breastfeeding acts as a natural deterrent to pregnancy, owners could also insure higher fertility through early weaning. Modern medical research documents the powerful biological linkage between breastfeeding and child survival. Infants who are breastfed longer than one year have the highest survival rates and higher natural immunization. Since people of African heritage are disproportionately lactose intolerant to animal milk, mountain babies died in great numbers from the diet substitutes that were mixed with contaminated water. Paradoxically, child mortality acted as a spur to high fertility. When their infants died, mountain slave women were often pregnant again within less than a year. While masters required early weaning of slave children, their own infants were typically breast-fed for at least two years. To accomplish that, owners employed black mothers to serve as wet nurses and care-givers for white offspring. At the same time that mountain slave women were weaning their own infants early, 1/5 of them worked as wet nurses for white babies. At some point during their enslavement, 2/3 of the females were employed as care-givers to white children, often requiring them to leave their own offspring without adequate nutrition and nurture.

-- Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery and the Black Appalachian Family

In his narrative, Frederick Douglass uses blood to illustrate the horror of slavery and the connection that human beings should have with one another. Harriet Jacobs uses mother's milk to accomplish the same thing in hers. Again and again she points out the total control the slaveowners had over slave women's reproduction, and how the natural bonds of human family were torn asunder by masters and mistresses who treated their slaves like livestock. And yet these same masters and mistresses had often been suckled by black slave wet nurses, even as the slave's own children were left to languish un- or under-fed.

In the first chapter, Jacobs tells of her grandmother, who served her master's household "in all capacities, from cook and wet nurse to seamstress" (1810). She writes of her grandmother's unsuccessful efforts to save enough money to buy her own children, who were separated at the death of her mistress, who "possessed but few slaves; and at her death those were all distributed among her relatives. Five of them were my grandmother's children, and had shared the same milk that nourished her mother's children" (1811).

The milk that was shared by Jacobs' grandmother's children and the children of her grandmother's mistress represents what should be a lasting emotional bond between mother and children and between the children themselves. This "milk kinship" -- the connection of children nursed by the same woman -- is still recognized in Islamic law in that they are considered to have permanent family-like relationships and cannot marry (Wikipedia "Wet Nurse"). The Wikipedia article on "milk kinship" goes on to quote Avner Giladi's paper, "Breast-feeding in Medieval Islamic thought. A preliminary study of legal and medical writings", in which he writes: "It is extremely important to understand that in all cases 'What is forbidden by blood kinship is equally forbidden by milk kinship'."

Just as Douglass points out the perversion of human relationship that resulted in the slaveowner's soul being "stained with his brother's blood" (Douglass 2082), Jacobs shows us the vulgarity that wet nursing became -- rather than a basis for connection between human beings, it was merely another way of exploiting the slaves, of using the labor and products of their bodies for the benefit of slaveowners.


Addendum: Today, there is a resurgence in wet nursing as an occupation, especially among lower-income women. This practice is very controversial, especially when the wet nurse is a woman of color and the hiring mother is white. On The Black Breastfeeding Blog, author Jennifer James wonders, "How can any black woman in good conscience become a modern-day mammy? I know the money is good, but somewhere the line has to be drawn. There are simply too many historical implications around the wet nursing travesty that has led to devastating breastfeeding rates among black women today. In truth, I didn't know black women were still being wet nurses and I certainly don't want to see it happen in large numbers."

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