Was there a European breastfeeding pattern?

Abstract

There is no lack of surveys showing that from a high rate of breastfeeding in the industrializing world of the early 20th century, after World War II the incidence declined to a nadir around 1960. For instance only a third of the infants in the US were given their own mothers' milk. The suckling of the new born is clearly not a natural instinct but needs to be taught and supported. Even if quantitative data is hard to come by for earlier centuries, there still is ample evidence that many mothers followed a tradition of not breastfeeding themselves, especially in the early 18th century. The reasons for this are partly economical, centered on the mother's heavy workload in non-industrial and energy-poor societies. But there are also cultural background factors behind the use of wet-nurses and artificial nourishment, where medical, religious and sexual ideas blend into a persuasive set of motives imprinting in women that breastfeeding is undesirable. The sending of urban babies to wet-nurses in the countryside was in part motivated by the tough epidemic climate in the cities. Modern anthropological research shows how cultural and economic motives can be doubly effective by reinforcing each other. The paper hypothesizes that for Western Europe where we have the richest historical records there may have been a breastfeeding pattern with more extensive breastfeeding in the northern parts of the continent and more use of wet-nurses and artificial nourishment in the Catholic southern parts, and that this may be rooted in long-lasting cultural factors. In addition there may have a number of places (Iceland, the Fennoscandian Arctic) where women had difficulty breastfeeding consistently because of an especially heavy workload in a tough environment, and where this developed into normative behaviour.

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