Research project's summary
At the crossroads of the history of women and gender, the history of work and the history of the family, this research aims to make the history of wet nurses and their paid maternity in France, when wet nursing is a key form of childcare, reaching peaks that are nowhere equalled in Europe. Attentive to its massification and institutionalisation, this study runs from the first attempts by the State to regulate this market in 1715 to the end of the wet nurse’s status with the creation of the function of maternal assistant on 2 October 1945. It is based on a multi-situated approach between town and country, metropolis and empire, France and neighbouring countries, with the aim of restoring the interplay of scales and the spatial, economic, social and family interdependence that underpins childcare. “Women with mercenary breasts” (Louis-Sébastien Mercier), essential childcare providers until the beginning of the 20th century, wet nurses are at the heart of this survey. By shedding light on these “mothers in the shadows”, grasping the logics that structure the wet nursing market and studying the relations of mutual dependence at play in the wet nursing trade, I wish to understand to what extent this domestic and reproductive work has been a central link in the social organisation of modernity.
École Normale Supérieure
Bâtiment Oïkos
48 boulevard Jourdan
75014 PARIS