Lara Vapnek—The Labor of Infant Feeding

The Journal of American History

In this episode of the Journal of American History Podcast Andrew Cooper speaks with Lara Vapnek about her article, "The Labor of Infant Feeding: Wet-Nursing at the Nursery and Child's Hospital, 1854–1910," which appeared in the June 2022 issue of the Journal of American History. Lara explains how the labor of infant feeding shaped the meaning of motherhood by examining the practice of wet-nursing at the Nursery and Child’s Hospital (1854–1910) in New York City. Elite women who volunteered as hospital managers positioned themselves as moral mothers, detached from the bodily labor of breast feeding and responsible for the welfare of poor white mothers and children. The impoverished immigrant women served by the institution had little choice but to work as wet nurses. Institutional records reveal the dependence of elite women on wet nurses, the precarity of poor women’s motherhood, and the vulnerability of their infants. Andrew and Lara discuss wet nursing as an issue of labor, race, and class in the northeastern United States, and the affective implications of violent work.

Read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaac119

Music: King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band's Mabel's Dream, 1923

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