The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled

An illustrated exploration of an age-old occupation, at once life-giving and freighted with contradictory ideas about women and their bodies

The wet nurse—a woman hired to breastfeed a child not her own—is indeed attested far back in history; in fact, archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen’s wet nurse. In modern Europe and the United States, wet nursing persisted into the early twentieth century, when bottles and formula rendered it obsolete. At one end of the social scale, w...