Expressing Motherhood

Wet Nursing and Human Milk Banking in Brazil

Langland, Victoria PhD

¹Departments of History and of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Victoria Langland, PhD, Departments of History and of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, 1029 Tisch Hall, 435 South State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003, USA. Email: [email protected]

Received January 16, 2019

Accepted January 23, 2019

Journal of Human Lactation 35(2):p 354-361, May 2019. | DOI: 10.1177/0890334419830987

In early twentieth-century Brazil the proponents of human milk banking considered this development to signal the end of wet nursing and the start of a whole new day, one altogether better for the paid donors of human milk, their children, and the children in need of human milk. But wet nursing persisted alongside the new human milk banks for most of the twentieth century. Moreover, as this paper argues, the organizers and directors of milk banks drew on and constructed ideas about wet nursing, and about the generations of poor Afro-Brazilian women who had performed this labor, in the design and operation of the first milk banks.