Selling Mother's Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914. By George D. Sussman. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Pp. ix, 210. $16.95

In Selling Mother's Milk George Sussman analyzes two centuries of wet-nursing in France which coincide with the rise and decline of the population growth rate and with a precocious decline in fertility. But it is not the relationship between wet-nursing and rates of fertility and mortality that is his primary concern. Rather, he is interested in explaining an example of French exceptionalism. The practice of wet-nursing (hiring women who themselves have recently become mothers to suckle other women's infants) was much more widespread in France than in other European countries. Although the origins of the practice remain veiled in the mists of the past, Sussman has found evidence that upper-class infants were given to wet nurses in the Middle Ages. By the eighteenth century wet-nursing had become common among the lower classes as well, especially among the families of artisans and small shopkeepers, at precisely the same time that the practice was being abandoned by the upper classes. Sussman shows convincingly that at this time most children suckled by wet nurses were urban children, legitimate as well as illegitimate, sent to the countryside to be nursed by peasant women, married or not. Despite Sussman's lack of interest in the effects of wet-nursing on French demography, the magnitude and geography of this transfer of children are important. They should be kept in mind in evaluating local demographic rates. In those rural areas which received nurslings, the infant and child mortality rates would have been inflated by the high rates of mortality among nurslings; the fertility rates would have been depressed by prolonged lactation; and the rates of natural increase would have been lower than in other rural parts of France. At the same time those towns and cities which sent children to wet nurses would have had deflated mortality rates and elevated fertility rates, making their rates of natural increase less negative than they otherwise would have been. The cessation of wet-nursing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would have had contrary effects on the demographic rates unless new practices were adopted to compensate for the changes. Sussman examines three hypotheses which have been advanced to explain the rise and decline of wet-nursing in France. The first one he labels the cultural explanation: wet-nursing was the result of parents' indifference toward their children's welfare. Parents sent their children to wet nurses knowing that the risks of mortality were high. According to the cultural explanation, as time passed and parents became more concerned about their offsprings' welfare, wet-nursing declined. The second hypothesis is a socioeconomic one: children were put out to wet nurses because maternal nursing was incompatible with women's income-earning activities essential for the family's well-being. As it became more possible for the father to support the family on his earnings alone, wet-nursing declined. The third explanation is a technological one: wet-nursing was the only feasible alternative to maternal nursing, which was avoided whenever possible (apparently for the reasons related to the cultural explanation), until the late nineteenth century. With the production and marketing of sterilized cow's milk, artificial or bottle-feeding became a reasonable alternative. Sussman concludes that the evidence is most consistent with the socioeconomic explanation, although he does not deny that the first contributed to the spread of wet-nursing or that the third contributed to its ultimate disappearance.