Wet nursing on ships: sisterly support and a necessary business

A hot topic today
Breast-feeding other women’s babies at sea. Where in maritime historiography are these lost stories of generosity, of life-saving, of sisterly support -- or, more practically, women’s private enterprise in a monopoly situation, the ship in mid-ocean?
Is it the general lack of work on travellers' emotions,including necessary trust, that means we don't we know much about situations of heightened mutual dependency at sea, apart from during the wrecking of ships and in lifeboats?
I'm thinking about those troubled intense times on voyages when people absolutely have to supplement for each other when (sea- or other) sickness hits. That includes seafarers generously covering each other's jobs when a shipmate is ill or distressed, or ships' passengers looking after the children of mothers too incapacitated to do anything? (This can be taken as a proof of the African adage that it takes a whole village to bring up a child).

The question comes up because wet nursing is a hot topic in the UK this month. Today BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour focused on wet nursing (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qlvb). Debate has been triggered because a picture of Jessica Anne Colletti (pictured above) breastfeeding her son and a friend’s child went viral. (http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/598028/What-is-wet-nursing-how-to-breastfeed-milk-bank-netmums).
Also a survey by Netmums, the website for mothers, last week found one in 25 British mothers are already wet nursing another's baby. Two in five women said they would do so.

Wet nursing at sea in the past
On ships this intimate supplementing happened too. However, the extent is not known because the subject, like menstruation at sea, has been regarded as not quite seemly.
Passengers' letters and diaries certainly make clear that some women on ships helped each other, with child care and especially when ill.
But there's little detail about the physical realities and emotions, so we can only speculate on the meanings of these intimate exchanges.
*
How far did that help extend? It’s partly dictated by the weather.
Wet nursing and seasickness are crucially linked because if nursing mothers suffer badly from mal-de-mer they become dehydrated and eventually stop lactating. At least one in ten people suffer from seasickness, and effective remedies were rare before the 1940s.
No-one would stand by and let a baby die of starvation. Of course shipmates who had copious enough milk would have stepped in. Peer pressure might have propelled them, too, if the child was so very distressed that the crying disturbed the whole ship.
Class relations and custom meant that the family of an elite mother would think it quite normal to send down to steerage for a labouring-class woman to do this job.

Wet nurse saves Manuel Lagos Besteiro’s life
In 1912 when Pepita Lagos Besteiro was returning to Havana from Madrid with her husband and baby Manolo, the six-month-old became so sick that the ship's surgeon pronounced that he would probably not survive the voyage.
But a willing wet nurse was found on board. And, says the family’s website, this unnamed woman (pictured with Manolo) successfully suckled Manolo back to health, ’to the point where it was noted that he had a ruddy complexion by the time the boat arrived in Cuba.’(http://www.emilito.org/family/emilito/lagos_us1/index.html)

Different ships, same needy babies
Without doubt other nursing mothers fed their shipmates’ babies too, on:
~ convict ships in the 1700s
~ migrant ships in the 1800s and 1900s
~ floating nurseries, post-war bride ships in WW1 and WW2

(WW2 brideship babies, mothers and nurses dine on board. Pic by Barney J. Gloster/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-175792)

After world war one, women on bride ships were in a particularly intense mothering situation, which could become a health-care crisis. Mothers of babies and children were traveling to the homes of their new servicemen husbands, on troop-ships unsuited for this new purpose.
On some WW2 brideships nursing mothers were much more officially controlled by the military than in WW1, partly to avoid epidemics of infection. On Canadian ships infants' mothers were made to switch to using formula milk - which of course caused stress. It was a hard situation for both babies and mothers to adjust to.
At least one in ten people are seasick. So on choppy voyages to the Antipodes and South Africa warbrides, and later Ten Pound Poms, would surely have assisted each other in providing breast milk.

Wet nursing at sea: the meanings
Historian Christina Hardyment, on Woman’s Hour, differentiated between two sorts of wet nursing arrangements on land:
~ between friends or family, when it was done out of kindness and concern
~ paid relationships, which would have meant both that an obliging woman was found, and employed on a casual basis, or that the passenger took her wet nurse with her

**
Wet nurse Margaret MacIwain (probably a mis-spelling), aged 26, sailed on the Manhattan from Liverpool to New York in September 1857. If she was lactating at that point she would have helped any needy baby -- for money, or at least for a grateful gift.
However, if she was sailing with a family by whom she was already engaged as a wet nurse, then she might not have been able to be generous. This would be especially true if she had a small supply of milk, perhaps because she was already feeding more than one greedy baby, or because she was too poorly.

**
Feminist journalist Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), by contrast, prepared for her voyage from Italy home to New York by weaning her son in spring 1850. Angelino had been born in early September 1848, so he was nineteen months old.
Margaret and her revolutionary marquis partner couldn't afford to pay for his 'great stout Roman mother of the flesh’, the wet nurse, to accompany them, even if the woman had been willing. Nino had to learn, in two months, how to do without the breast.
On the three-masted sail ship Elizabeth, Nino got his milk from the nanny goat. The five-week voyage ended fatally for them all when the ship foundered, and sank, says Margaret Fuller’s biographer Megan Marshall.

Conclusion
Voyages can often be very bonding experiences enriched by intense but fleeting friendships. Comradeship and the suspension of xenophobia are the most fascinating aspects of this heterotopic off-shore place.
For me it's rather a moving idea that not only did some people step off at the other side with new friends for life (which was particularly the case with WW2 bride ships). Children also left a ship with milk-kin, 'sisters and brothers' bonded by the shared breast.
The lost history of wet nursing at sea would be invaluable in helping us understand how gendered power relations were changed in these peculiar floating hotel and boarding houses so far from land.
**
My questions, which will probably never be answered, are:
~ how did this once-acceptable practice of hiring a wet nurse worked at sea when family were white and the wet nurse was a Chinese amah or Indian ayah. Did she have to feed the baby in private, to avoid onlookers’ racist distaste? Was she allowed to take her own baby?
~ Wet nurses' successful production of milk would have been crucial to their value on the voyage. Did their luggage include herbs to help promote copious milk production?
~ When late-nineteenth-century shipping companies advertised that their passenger ships carried a cow, was this a recognition that taking a wet nurse was something fewer people could now afford? Were children weaned early if they were involved in migration?

Chinese stewardess & young daughter captured in WW1

What a revelation this image is! A Chinese female shipboard worker in wartime. It's evidence of a past that is not at all visible in mainstream historiography. It shows that at least one Chinese women worked at sea despite the war. Not only that, she traveled with her child (meaning working a double shift). Not only that, both were captured by the enemy.

Women in many countries worked at sea as stewardesses throughout WW1. (Far fewer did so in WW2, in Britain at least). They faced risks of capture and shipwreck, as male crew did. They didn't necessarily count themselves as women when the 'abandon ship' order said women and children should leave first.

As the war went on ships' stewardesses dwindled in number. This was partly because of the convention that women should not be in danger zones, which increasingly meant European shipping lines replaced women crew with men. But also, so few women passengers (bouches inutiles) were allowed to take up scarce space on wartime ships, that there were no women for the stewardess to serve.

Many women were prepared to travel, no matter what the risk. They regretted that they were forced to stay home.

I've found evidence of only one British stewardess sailing by 1917. But this Chinese stewardess was sailing as late as 26 September 1917. She was on the Indian Ocean on the Japanese freighter, Hitachi Maru.

Having her her young daughter with her was not exceptional. It was a Chinese custom for seafarers to have families at sea. Many women passengers were on this ship too.

This image from the Australian War Memorial shows the unnamed stewardess and her girl among the Chinese crew. It's taken after they were all captured by the German armed merchant raider, SMS Wolf, south of the Maldive Islands.(Image number P05338.160, Photographer unknown)

After being captured crew and passengers alike had to wait a month at Suvadiva Atoll. The ship was scuttled. And they were, presumably, freed. German crew were often gallant to women and children, even at that fierce stage in the war. In some cases German crew let women go free or gave them priority.

Was this the case here? And what did the women make of an experience that is normally traumatic experience? It looks oddly matey here. Who knows. But how useful it was that a man on the Wolf had his camera with him, used it, and that the picture survives.

Basque children’s evacuation – and their seafaring ‘aunties’.

75 years ago, on May 21 1937 British philanthropists helped thousands of children from a Spain being torn apart by war ( http://www.basquechildren.org). Los Niños (pictured on arrival, above) were to stay in England for up to two years.

And today 12-13 May 2012 a conference, reunion and exhibition at Southampton celebrate that mercy mission and its aftermath (http://www.southampton.ac.uk/ml/news/2012/05/09_exhibition_to_commemorate_child_refugees_of_the_spanish_civil_war.page)

Let’s give praise where praise is due. Women, socialist women, were the main organisers of that 1937evacuation. They were led by Leah Manning (later a Labour MP)(see pic)

of Spanish Medical Aid, along with Edith Pye of the Society of Friends, and the Tory but progressive Duchess of Atholl, President of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief.

Women, particularly single left-wing teachers, were the main people who joined the famous evacuation on an especially chartered ship, Habana. They looked after the children on the two-day voyage.

I found this when researching women who had been escorts on other ships, for my new book, Risk: Women on the wartime seas (Yale University Press, 2013).

In world wars, women, almost always volunteers, escorted children and also disoriented adult refugees on British ships. Often they were not even being paid expenses. Some were even killed during their WW2 voyages, captured and interned.

Called ‘aunty’, many of the women were experienced travellers and lively independent types, at a time when women’s mobility was still limited and their solo travel problematic. Unsung and overlooked, these pioneers deserve recognition. They were members of a minority who cleverly utilised gendered conventions (‘women are suitable carers for little ones’) to do all the travelling they could, despite low incomes.

WW1: women escorts, especially Quakers, often suffrage campaigners, escorted Belgian families fleeing to Britain, or German women and their children who were being repatriated (usually against their will).

WW2: female escorts were employed by CORB, Children’s Overseas Reception Board, CORB, in summer 1940 to take British children to the US, Canada, the Cape and Australia.

1937: In the Spanish case the children and their escorts sailed as a result of following intense British socialist campaigning, after Guernica was destroyed, on April 26 1937. The British Government insisted that this was a one-off voyage.

Homerton graduate Leah Manning, Dr Audrey Russell and others went out to fetch the nearly 4000 children, helped load them in Bilbao and then sailed back to Southampton. Evacuations almost always meant ships were worryingly overcrowded. The ship too, which was supposed to carry around 800 passengers, actually carried 3840 children, 80 teachers, 120 helpers (escorts), 15 catholic priests and 2 doctors.

Teachers’ and escorts’ work was not only to help children find places to sleep – even lifeboats. It was also to help them settle despite the difficulties such as separation trauma, disorientation and homesickness.

On the Habana, said Leah Manning, ‘Head to tail the senoritas laid out our precious cargo - on the bulkheads, in the swimming pool, in the state rooms and along the alley ways. [They were] for all the world like the little sardinas about which they were always singing.’

The Bay of Biscay is notoriously choppy and it was on that voyage too. Most of the children were so seasick, that ‘for two dreadful days and nights … [we] slipped and slithered from one pool of diarrhoea and vomit to another… assuring them it wasn’t the fascists who had stirred up the troubled waters against them,’ wrote Manning.

No one has mentioned that the escorts must have been suffering seasickness too, as they tried to do their job. New research has shown that women are nearly twice as likely as men to be seasick.

So these escorts were labouring under additional difficulties. But their main role was trying to figure out how to handle the unknown children, who were all too often unhelpfully reserved about their agonies, which were instead expressed through bed-wetting.

Such seafaring escorts still accompany children travelling alone today. Some are employed by the Universal Aunts agency, which was founded by Gertrude Maclean, who escorted her nieces and nephews from far parts of the empire to boarding school before WW1. The ship in the image makes clear the lure of travel. (http://www.universalaunts.co.uk/history.html)

Others were/are paid employees of shipping lines. Usually stewardesses and children’s hostesses, they were seconded for this function.

And sometimes, although they initially fancied a ‘free voyage,’ as well as wanting to support a worthy cause, escorts must have been very glad when the ship reached its destination. Many such ‘aunties’ continued to maintain contact with those they escorted.

Women and children first? Costa Concordia controversy has precedents in suffragettes' history

The 'men were pushing women aside, and they shouldn't' saga goes on. Woman's Hour today has just aired some useful modern arguments showing chivalry is not the province of just one sex. People help other people anyway, said evacuation expert Ed Galea.

In researching women's history in sea disasters I've found that when men gave women priority as the Titanic sank in 1912 some suffrage campaigners said later they wouldn't have accepted that particular gendered sort of gallant treatment. They wanted equal rights - including the vote - so why would they accept such inequality on a ship? It would have been hypocritical.

Of course right-wing men attacked this 'rebuff':

~~~ GK Chesterton (see pic), the high-profile writer, who was later to be in the government’s War Propaganda Bureau, was outraged that month by the (now untraceable)feminist response and particularly put out by
‘the displeasing incident of Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, who, immediately after the disaster, seems to have hastened to assure the public that men must get no credit for giving the boats up to women, because it was the "rule" at sea.
'Whether this was a graceful thing for a gay spinster to say to eight hundred widows in the very hour of doom is not worth inquiry here… What does Miss Pankhurst imagine a “rule” is--a sort of basilisk?
'Some hundreds of men are, in the exact and literal sense of the proverb, between the devil and the deep sea. It is their business, if they can make up their minds to it, to accept the deep sea and resist the devil.
'What does Miss Pankhurst suppose a “rule” could do to them in such extremities? Does she think the captain would fine every man sixpence who expressed a preference for his life?’

~~~ anti-feminist journalist Harold Owen insisted in 1912 that ‘The wreck of the Birkenhead is man’s answer to the cry for equality of the sexes.’He meant that, because every woman was saved, men could say 'See, if we'd given you equality you'd dead now. We save your lives by ensuring you are not equal.'

But as socialist-feminist campaigner Charlotte Despard argued, ‘We want a new conception of chivalry. We want it to go outside the shell of conventional manners ....a chivalry, the reigning principle of which will be reverence for every honest worker, with special regard for the weaker amongst their number.’

Such new chivalry meant respecting women enough to give them the vote, and working on the principle that no one sex is necessarily more or less disposable than the other. Respect for those in the greatest need was the point.

Look out for my book next year: Risk! Women on the Wartime Seas! Yale University Press.
PIC: My art work using logo from Pankhurst's newspaper