“There is no substitute for maternal solicitude (sollicitude),” Rousseau famously writes early on in Emile (1762), attacking mothers who prefer not to breastfeed. Breasts can be replaced, Rousseau argues; they can be hired; poor women, animals, can furnish just physical milk. But the spirit that comes down to you through your birth mother’s body, as you eat and drink and consume her, escapes all fungibility. Today, of course, the figure of the commercial surrogate mother—with her twin, the “real” and unpaid mother—is everywhere again.
Since 2011 or so, commercial surrogacy has been booming globally and intermittently getting banned; in Silicon Valley, where the industry is especially thriving, gestational workers are being turned into sin-eaters. We can think about the rise of commercial surrogacy in terms of the phenomenon that Premilla Nadasen describes in Care, in which social reproduction (in the Marxist feminist sense) has become not just a precondition for capitalist profit but a main source of it. From there, we could also, I think, try to see what happens when we put the figure of the maternal surrogate today alongside scenes of her counterpart in the early modern world. Because while Rousseau, obviously, was not fixated on commercial gestational surrogacy, his fixation on something like commercial lactational surrogacy carries a similar irony, dissolving the limits of modern selfhood when it means to make them inalienable—revealing, as Sophie Lewis argues in Full Surrogacy Now, the truth that “infants don’t belong to anyone, ever.”
Recent work has started to connect the history of the body in early modern Europe to the political critique of care. In Presence, in a chapter titled “Giving Suck,” Erin Maglaque underlines the massive redistribution of maternal labor that occurred across eighteenth-century Europe: the disappearing of the wet nurse. If, at the start of the century, the majority of wealthy and aristocratic families outsourced breastfeeding, by the end of the century, Maglaque notes, the majority had reassigned the job to birth mothers. Following recent turns in Marxist feminist historiography, Presence goes on tosuggest that we rethink the early modern war on paid breastfeeding as still another transition to capitalism in the sense argued for by Silvia Federici: after the witches, the wet nurses were banned from the waged workplace, and suckling was newly enclosed in the home and devalued. (Where Presence traces the continued disappearing of care workers across early modernity, Nadasen shows the way in which our current transition to capitalism inverts the phenomenon—globally proliferating care workers.) Maglaque focuses on the imaginative shift that accompanied and incited the enclosure. Going back to a work like Emile, she argues, we can watch as suckling gets elevated from a scene of compensable (also erotic) labor into a scene of “love.” Devaluation is often in conspiracy with spiritual, even political theological, pricelessness.
In the case of Emile, I’m not actually sure we’re talking about love—sollicitude is more awful than that, a kind of ethical seizure prior to any familiar passion. But whatever the word hanging over the front door, what Presence pushes us to do is to link the historical enclosure of women’s work to the dream of an enclosed self. (“The body… was porous to the world,” Maglaque writes of her desire for the premodern.) Emile, after all, is Rousseau’s treatise on education, and his reason for wanting to cut out maternal surrogates is pedagogical. The world around him, he explains, can only see suckling in terms of the mere sustaining of physical life, but the ancients knew that such work was education; had the Author of Nature wanted men to be our first teachers, he adds in his immediate first footnote, “He would have given them milk.” In a strange way, Rousseau is arguing for breastfeeding what Sophie Lewis wants to show about gestation (and the limits of social reproduction theory): as work, reproductive biology always brings something more or other than literal reproduction. “Form an enclosure around your child’s soul,” Rousseau thus counsels his reader, lest a sollicitude-less milk or body enter him and remake him not yours.
What is sollicitude, then? If we translated the word as “care,” this wouldn’t be care as unpaid and domesticated bodily labor but something higher still—care as spirit attached to your first mother’s stuff, descending with a familiar divinity. Of course, there’s a way out, or a way to read Rousseau’s finality about sollicitude differently. If everything about the mother can be replaced (breast, milk, body) except her sollicitude, then maybe such a teacher is pure ghost; in this world, the idea could be, ethical life remains substitutes and body doubles all the way down. Following Presence, we could also keep on tracing a history of the irreplaceable mother. Looking at educational manuals written around the beginning of early modern thought or just on the other side of it, we could watch paid surrogate mothers becoming a problem. In a 1453 text often called the first pedagogical treatise in Spain, for example, the Salamancan bishop and court historian Rodrigo Sanchez de Arévalo addresses new fathers (Rousseau addresses new mothers): “If possible,” Arévalo instructs, “the new mother should suckle her own infant, since she will do so with greater diligence and love (maiore cum diligencia et amore) than a wet nurse, who will suckle him on a kind of conscripted human kindness (quandam ascriptitiam benigvolentiam), for the sake of a wage.” In De liberis educandis (On Educating Children) (1509), Antonio de Nebrija poses the distinction in the form of a question with an emerging theological sarcasm: “And who will suckle with less diligence (minori diligentia)—the birth mother, who loves with the highest tenderness, or the wet nurse hired for pay, who takes nothing of God’s love (charitatis) into account, and puts a price on every part of herself?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but I don’t think there’s sollicitude here yet. The Renaissance Latin word we might want to translate as “care” in these two moments—diligentia—suggests sustained attention more than prior spiritual calling. In this sense, while Arévalo and Nebrija are pitting the education done by paid mothers against the education done by the unpaid mother, the distinction given to the latter is practically relative rather than metaphysically absolute, and in both cases, paid, freely given, breastfeeding remains labor (labor nutriendi)—motheringstill has a body. In conversation with Maglaque, it would be worth noting, too, that if suckling is still understood as work in texts like these, it remains dirty work: done out of sight, somewhere outside the city, and also universally looked down on (negligunt), as Nebrija complains. Indeed, in contemporary, but not humanist, works like Jaume Roig’s Mirror (1460), a work of medical Mariology in rhymed Catalan, the voice of King Solomon thunders that highborn mothers and mothers of means everywhere find breastfeeding “mothers” disgusting (tener per vils / mares que crien).
What’s most interesting, perhaps, in terms of a history of premodern surrogacy, is Arévalo’s newly humanist use of the adjective ascriptitius. The bodily labor done by a wet nurse is not just conscripted, as in the classical sense of ascriptitius, but supernumerary, ingrafted, faked; the wet nurse is an impostor, her milk insincere, in every way unlike the milk of the Word. Her repeated presence generates counterfeit sons, Nebrija would add, coins that lack the quality of real and approved money (vera probataque pecunia). For Nebrija as for Arévalo, where the Christian’s real mother would have fed him on the milk of human kindness—benevolentia being bound up with Ciceronian humanitas, or the feeling that enrolled a person in human society—his surrogate mother educated him on a moneyed simulation. (I’m using masculine pronouns just following my son-centric texts.)
The pedagogical distinction between paid breastfeeding and diligent breastfeeding was not exactly new. Both Arevalo and Nebrija are reciting lines from On the Education of Children (De liberis educandis) (Nebrija takes the title outright), a mid-century treatise then attributed to Plutarch, centered on the power of diligentia (or care) as education, and labor, and translated into Latin in 1411; the Renaissance recoining of ascriptitius happens in that translation. The Plutarchan image of the mercenarial mother, who cares for wages (mercedis gratia diligentes)—for a dirty little salary (pro sordido salario), as the work of suckling layers over with grime—will run across early modern scenes of breastfeeding-as-education. In “The New Mother” (1526), one of Erasmus’s colloquia, an old painter interrogates a family friend who has just given birth (and whose son is as they speak being breastfed by another woman in the other room): “Or isn’t it a kind of exposure to hand over the tender infant, still red from its mother, drawing breath from its mother, crying for its mother’s care—a sound said to move even wild beasts—to a woman who perhaps has neither good health nor intact morals and who, finally, may be more concerned about a bit of money than your whole baby?” Exposure (expositio) was the ancient practice of abandoning unwanted infants, often in the woods; Erasmus’s character turns it into a metaphor for subjecting an infant to the work of a hired breast (conducticiam mammam). In the Franciscan humanist Juan de Pineda’s Familiar Dialogues on Christian Agriculture (Diálogos familiares de la agricultura cristiana) (1589), a physician warns his friends that surrogate mothers today, thinking only of their bit of coin, force themselves to work even when they feel themselves and their milks filling with anger or some other poisonous affect—halving when not killing (y matan) infants born perfect and whole.
The figure of the mercenarial mother will reappear at the beginning of Emile, too, when Rousseau writes that contemporary parents, outsourcing breastfeeding, “confide [their children] to mercenary women, who find themselves mothers of alien children on whose behalf nature tells them nothing.” But it wasn’t just the changing of money that foreclosed the call of sollicitude and made wet nurses so educationally dangerous. It was also the intense material difference posed by every replacement mother, mercenarial and otherwise, to the body of the person being formed.
Besides On the Education of Children, the other primary classical source for Renaissance writing about the education done by breastfeeding was a speech found in Book 12 of Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights (~180), attributed to the orator Favorinus. Virtually every Renaissance theorist of suckling cites Favorinus’s speech, including Juan Luis Vives in the beginning to On the Instruction of a Christian Woman (1526): “It happens, I know not how, that we suck in with milk not only love, but a disposition toward certain habits,” Vives explains to Christian queens, stepping around the wet nurse in the room, “[and so] we repeatedly find ourselves marveling, as Favorinus says in Aulus Gellius, that the sons of chaste women end up bearing resemblances (similes) to neither of their parents, neither in body nor in mind.” But the danger preceded even those certain—bad—habits that highborn infants sucked in. Not just affective ties but bodily ones, likenesses, were generated between wet nurse and student. Suckling could cross status and class, Christians and non-Christians, and also species; everyone knows, Vives goes on, the fable of the child suckled on the milk of a sow, who spent his life rolling in mud. From there the lesson extended to animal-animal agriculture (kids suckled by ewes, Nebrija’s Favorinus adds, come out with weirdly sheepish wool), and down to vegetative ensoulment, where every act of transplantation risked an essential alteration: “The grapevine transferred to an alien hill changes its essence,” Erasmus’s old painter tries to explain to the new mother in “The New Mother,” reciting Favorinus. Rousseau’s later call for a kind of educational agrarian enclosure, the child a “nascent shrub” to be fenced in, develops the image.
Bad, lower-class, un-Christian, and un-human habits coursed through hired milks, and materially so. (Missing the psychological materialism, historians often reduce the contamination in premodern milk crossings to the same socially metaphorical Otherness.) But an education also occurred in the very fact of being crossed over from a familiar body to an alien one.
Across the 1420s, for example, the Franciscan priest Bernardino of Siena terrorized people with a sermon about the violence enacted through wet nurses on Christian infants, running through a series of imaginary agricultural experiments in displacement—go and take one of our Sienan grapevines, he would preach, and see what happens when you plant it in Lombardy—before enacting the moment that a child was returned home to his parents after being suckled elsewhere. “‘I don’t know who you resemble,” Bernardino would cry, his voice raising in imitation of a horrified mother, “‘but you don’t resemble either of us (tu non somigli niun di noi).”
This was a riff on the familiarly Aristotelian concept of the monstrous birth, in which a child came out lacking resemblances to his mother and father (mainly his father)—a kind of monstrous rebirth, in which the work of semen and gestation was written over by the work of alien suckling.
Within premodern scenes of infant education, the irreplaceable mother was a guarantor not just of family property but self-continuity. This becomes clearest in the Favorinian notion of outsourced breastfeeding as approaching murder—which is also where we come up against one of the clearest traces of maternal unsubstitutability as it (or she) reappears in Emile. Every new body is fashioned out of its mother’s menstrual blood, Favorinus rehearses Aristotelian embryology; the new being eats that same blood in the womb, eating what it is; the blood left uneaten at birth is then marshaled upward to the breasts by Nature, or God, where it gets heated up and whitened into milk. “To then deprive the child of the familiar and known food of his own blood (proprii atque consueti atque cogniti sanguinis alimento privare)”—this is Nebrija’s Favorinus again—is akin to the crime of abortion (aborsus faciunt).
When centuries later Rousseau describes the milk of a child’s mother as the “same blood out of which he is formed,” he will no longer be citing contemporary science (Aristotle’s picture having long been replaced) but premodern science in its relegated form as folk wisdom. And in the modern rehearsal of Favorinian self-sameness, the blood, the milk, will have been displaced as the thing. In Emile, we can watch maternal blood being translated upwards into maternal sollicitude.
Tracing a history of surrogacy as the Christian history that it is, we would have to go further still, exploring the ways in which the Aristotelian imperative to eat what you are, epitomized in scenes of breastfeeding-as-education, reference and resonate with the theological imperative to receive what you are (as Augustine records God) in suckling the eucharistic elementa. After all, historians almost always exclusively point to the Virgin Mary as the theological template for what would become modern sentimental motherhood (even Maglaque does this), but medieval Christians understood breastfeeding to be imitatio Christi more than imitatio Mariae; to give your body and blood up as food and drink was to echo the moral work done through the sacrament of the Eucharist. Maternal solicitude was bodied forth in Jesus as original surrogate.
It is thus that Anselm describes Paul, mothering after Christ, as a wet nurse rebirthing Christians through a marvelous sollicitudo, and that Aquinas distinguishes bad sollicitudo (misplaced anxiety, caring too much about the wrong things) from good sollicitudo (worldly caring directed toward God). Starting here, it might turn out that suckling is never as Christian as it is in Emile, where Jesus gets disappeared into the inimitable care called “mother.”
Staying in the more visible present, we could consider the proliferation of mothers across late medieval and early modern thought and the ways in which past intuitions about open-source selfhood can become ours. Indeed and in a nicely twisted way, insofar as Bernardino of Siena or Rousseau dwelled in what was for them the nightmare of an infant made into nobody’s, parental stamps washed out by fuller presences, they speculate for us (to quote Sophie Lewis) “about what babymaking [and people-making] beyond blood, private coupledom, and the gene fetish might one day be.”
