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Sandra writes regarding the use of wet nurses:
> (but
> never redheads)

Curious!!! Why?

Peace,
Wynn

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In a message dated 1/15/02 8:41:44 AM, Otterspur@... writes:

<< Curious!!! Why? >>

They thought personality traits were passed through breastmilk ("they" being
the English in the Renaissance and thereafter, if I remember what I've read
correctly) and redheads were...

mean and grumpy, they thought, and it was better to bring babies up to be
"sweet tempered."

The most interesting book I ever read about breastfeeding, I don't have. It
was out of the university's library here and I renewed and renewed it until I
finally had to let them have their book back. But it was by a female
anthropologist (or two, I think) who were studying history and belief
concerning breastfeeding.

One of their most interesting points goes against LLL teachings, and that is
that there are women who work in hotels in Puerto Rico but live on
neighboring islands (Domincan Republic? I forget their exact details), and
they live at the hotel for five days and go home for their two days off.
While they were gone, their mothers nursed the babies, and when they were
home the moms did, and their milk supplies didn't dry up, and the
grandmothers lactated easily to cover the other days.

Since nobody thought it impossible or even weird, it was common.

Sandra

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In a message dated 1/15/02 8:41:44 AM, Otterspur@... writes:

<< Curious!!! Why? >>

First, I caution you who are offended by porn NOT to go to Google.com and
enter wetnurse and redhead. No, no, no.

But putting in

-=-
Each advance in psychogenic mode diminishes the emotional distance between
mother and child. The infanticidal mode of antiquity handled the anxiety
posed by the infant's needs through measures which constantly threatened the
child's life, including regular infanticide by rich and poor alike. The
medieval mode of abandonment substituted continuous rejection of the child,
whether to wetnurse, fosterage or monastery. The ambivalent parent, beginning
in the Renaissance, viewed the infant as at once both irrevocably evil and
greatly idealized. The intrusive mode of the eighteenth century produced a
mother who could now guarantee the child some measure of her love but only
under the condition of total control of his emotions. And the currently
predominant socializing mode uses covert manipulation of the child
predominantly through guilt and the delegation of parental goals.

-=-Each psychogenic mode in turn produces historically new adult
psychospecies: the schizoid character of antiquity gives way to the autistic
character produced by the abandonment of medieval childhood, the late
medieval manic-depressive character being followed by the early modern
compulsive character, the result of intrusive mode parenting, and finally by
the various types of anxiety characters so commonly found in contemporary
society.-=-

. . . .

-=-
Not only was England in the seventeenth century ahead of the rest of Europe
in child care, but it was more particularly the English middle class, from
which so many American mothers were drawn, which first achieved these
historically new attitudes toward children. At a time when the English
nobility still sent their children out to wetnurse, numbers of brave English
middle-class mothers, particularly Puritan mothers, who were encouraged to
pray with and watch closely over their children, began for the first time in
history to face the enormous anxieties of actually relating with empathy to
the emotional needs of the infant at their breast. When, for instance, their
babies cried upon being swaddled, these mothers stopped complaining that man
was born in shackles", a phrase repeated ad nauseum since Pliny(8), and
instead empathized with their infants and tried leaving them unswaddled, over
the horrified objections of their doctors. Frenchmen thought the sight of
these unswaddled English infants "deplorable" and complained of the excessive
"indulgence of Mothers . . . among the English."(9)

-=-It was from such mothers as these that the American personality was
formed. Selected from among the most advanced, and isolated from the
"swamping" effects of earlier-mode parents, American mothers became the first
in history to face their ambivalent feelings and to begin to fashion the
modern intrusive mode of childrearing, a mode which was closer, more
nurturant, more consistent and more controlling than any prior mode in the
evolution of childhood. The evidence for this is everywhere.....-=-

(from http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/p105x115.htm, an article on the
history of the U.S.)

I'm still looking at that article and other sources I found by looking up

infant care wetnurse history



Sandra

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(about child abandonment and infanticide in 19th century Germany...)
-=-...the figures in the south--the highest in Europe--being due to their
practice of not breastfeeding,300 since hand-fed babies died at a rate three
times that of breast-fed babies.301-=-

One of the best things, for me, about breastfeeding, was the hormonal change
in me when the baby was nursing. It made me calm and patient--physically
calm and patient and loving, and having the baby's head there where I could
touch, see and smell it made me hugely protective of that baby, and made the
baby seem a true and continuing part of me and my existence. So to find that
there were whole cultures in which breastfeeding was almost obliterated (kind
of like 1950's U.S...) makes me physically react to the thousands of REALLY
miserable and sickly babies that kind of "belief" and action will cause.

Note below that even a write being sympathetic to German infants referred to
them as "worms":

-=-
Nineteenth-century doctors condemned the practice of German mothers refusing
to breastfeed their babies, saying the pap made of flour and water or milk
was "usually so thick that it has to be forced into the child and only
becomes digestible when mixed with saliva and stomach fluids. At its worst it
is curdled and sour."303 Infants were so commonly hungry that "those poor
worms get their mouths stuffed with a dirty rag containing chewed bread so
that they cannot scream."304 Ende reports that for centuries "One rarely
encounters a German infant who is fully breastfed. Everywhere they got their
mouths stuffed with Zulp, a small linen bag filled with breadSwaddled babies
could hardly get rid of these often dirty rags."305 Mothers who could afford
it sent their newborn to wetnurses--commonly called Engelmacherin,
"angelmakers," because they were so negligent toward the children. -=-

I haven't followed any footnotes. Too scary as it is.

I know of pewter "feeding cans" from England, and "pap" which was just
re-hydrated by adding milk or water to what had been sitting in a pewter can
already for days sometimes. They were left on a low shelf or by the fire,
and babies could come along and sip out of the spout, a straw-like thing
which went to the bottom of the can.

Pewter itself is a lead-poisoning situation, even without spoiled milk and
days-old porridge in it, growing who-knows what.

http://webpages.charter.net/jspeyrer/war2.htm