Abstract
Lower-class women have been employed to breast-feed and rear upper-class children in societies around the world. The blurring or crossing of class and gender boundaries that this practice produces has frequently invited critical evaluation of contemporary moralists and intellectuals. The specific attention such debates draw to issues of gender, of status, and of social advancement through the female body, have provided historians with many insights into broader politics and culture. Previous studies have shown the practices and meanings of wet-nursing in China from the Sung. This article extends our knowledge and understanding of this significant institution back to medieval China.
Historical records, medical texts, and iconography are used in this article to reconstruct the selection, tasks, and treatment of the wet-nurses in imperial and aristocratic households; legal documents and stelae are applied to discuss these women’s chances and limits to power. Medieval moralists and intellectuals criticized the application of wet-nursing not because upper-class women disregarded breast-feeding as the obligation of motherhood, nor because lower-class women carried inferior milk and emotions that would probably corrupt their charges. The principal reason for scholar-officials to object to the institution was in fact the shattering of conventional gender and status boundaries which resulted if a former wet-nurse was enfeoffed with aristocratic title or if her former nursling wore mourning for her.
Court bureaucrats detested the idea that political dangers could arise if powerful men confided in and were influenced by these women to whom they considered they owed the debt of life. Although the bond between the wet-nurse and her charges was often depicted as a kind of mutual devotion, the reality was perhaps more complicated in view of the frequent political struggles in early medieval courts. Once a woman, slave or servant, was selected as a wet-nurse of the aristocratic new-born, she was forced to overlook her own children for the care of her master’s. Meanwhile, however, she was given the opportunity to promote her families and herself through her female dispositions of milk and mothering care. Since history was never written by lower-class women, the true emotions and thoughts of the wet-nurses are probably forever beyond our grasp.
Keywords
late antiquity and early medieval China, wet-nurse, gender, status
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