Milk Markets: Technology, the Lactating Body, and New Forms of Consumption

Abstract

In early chapters of Charles Dickens s 1848 novel; Dombey and Son, Mr. Dombey, a thriving industrialist, is forced to hire a lower-class wet nurse to sustain his family name and the Dombey commercial empire. After the death of his wife, the wet nurse, Polly is the primary source of nourishment and comfort for his only son; to her he states: It is not at all in this bargain that you need become attached to my child, or that my need become attached to you. I don't expect or desire anything of the kind. Quite the reverse. When you go away from here, you will have concluded what is a mere matter of bargain and sale, hiring and letting: and will stay away. The will cease to remember you; and you will cease, if you please to remember the child (14). In the context of this Victorian novel, breast milk is a valuable commodity exchanged for income and for a place within the household. Dickens represents what was a common reality; wet nurses were often women of the lower classes whose own children were relegated to baby farms or hand feeding, while nursing became the means of survival for poor women and for the infants of the more privileged classes. Emphasizing the economic nature of this exchange and the need to keep the wet nurse under his watchful eye, Dombey renames Polly Richards (implying a shift from poor to rich) and views her intimate interactions with the baby in a little glass conservatory adjacent to his dark, masculine study. The novels emphasis upon the regulation and observation of the intimate act of breastfeeding exemplifies how the female breast, and breastfeeding, became increasingly charged and contested in the nineteenth century. Here, the lower-class female body is disciplined as it exchanges breast milk as a commodity for entry into the middle-class household. In this literary depiction, the wet nurse creates anxiety and unease through her class position and her closeness to the infant, and yet she is a necessary inclusion to the household and crucial to the success of the Dombey family future. By the twentieth century the work of wet nursing began to steadily decline as discourses of maternity encouraged breastfeeding as a maternal duty and as scientific and technological innovations produced new artificial formulas and a range of improved bottle-feeding devices. Consequently breastfeeding was imagined either as the natural process of infant feeding and attachment shared between mother and - or as bottle feedings alternative or companion. Either way it was a process more deeply embedded in the science of domestic management that emerged in this period. Left not just in the hands of mothers, the act of breastfeeding was increasingly managed and shaped by a broader reading culture and became a subject of discussion and debate among doctors, scientists, and writers of domestic manuals. A model of efficiency that established how to feed infants, when to do it, and how to perform as an effective nursing mother all became scientifically addressed and managed at this time and continue to be today.1 The issues of boundary crossing and circulation that the nineteenthcentury wet nurse embodied continue in representations of breastfeeding and milk-sharing in early-twenty-first-century culture, but they take on new forms and are shaped by a broad range of forces. In this essay I begin to trace the multiple and shifting representations of breast milk and its disembodiment in contemporary culture, examining how its circulation as a product of the larger economy reveals the contradictory ways that motherhood and maternal care is imagined, managed, and, in some contexts, exploited. Tracing the transformation of breast milk as a commodity in the marketplace, I consider how medical technologies produce new corporate and global models of milk sharing based not upon the intimate relationship of maternal and infant bodies, but instead on scientifically transforming milk into a product to be shared on a much wider scale. …