On Monday morning, March 15, 1937, seven young Black women who worked as wet nurses for the City of Chicago staged a sit-down strike, occupying the City Hall office of Dr. Herman Bundesen, president of the Board of Health. Seated in two rows of straight-backed white chairs in a narrow anteroom, they kept on their coats, their dark, round hats with small feathers tucked into the brims, and their long scarves. Their knees almost touching, they held their purses on their laps, their gloves tidily folded under their hands.
In a photo published in Life magazine, six of the women are turned toward one another, laughing, smiling, full of joy in sisterly struggle. When one of many reporters who showed up — perhaps tipped off, perhaps already lurking around City Hall — asked how long they planned to stay, Mary Hart, age twenty, declared, “We can strike as long as we have to. And we certainly will. We’ll be here every day 8:30–4:30.”
Where did those striking wet nurses, among the most exploited Black women in the United States, find the power to make such an audacious show of militance in the depths of the Great Depression — gloves off?
The history of wet nursing, in which a woman nursed another woman’s baby at her own breast — usually at the expense of her own baby — is ancient, global, and chilling. As an occupation it depended on the existence of one group of women rich and powerful enough to hire or enslave others and another group of women so poor and oppressed that they had to provide their milk to those women’s babies.
European immigrants brought the tradition with them when they came to what is now the United States, hiring white, African American, and in some cases Native American women from the colonial period onward. The cruelties of wet nurses’ lives played out most powerfully under slavery. Enslaved women were forced to perform the exhausting and emotionally brutal work of feeding the babies of their enslavers—babies who would grow up to whip them, sell them, and do the same to the women’s enslaved children. While slaveholders did usually allow enslaved women to nurse their own babies to a limited extent, it was because those babies were valuable commodities.
In the late nineteenth century wet nursing continued under free labor; poor Black and immigrant women were often ejected from poorhouses and placed instead in private homes to nurse elite white women’s babies. Working conditions were terrible: 24 hours a day, seven days a week, live-in. They did have a bit more bargaining power than other domestic servants, since the babies needed their milk. But the women’s own children often died as a result: when one employment agency placed wet-nurses’ babies with other caretakers, 90 percent of the infants died.