ABSTRACT
The wet nurse was believed to be a necessity in royal households throughout the world; she became a status symbol in many families of the rich and she was an essential life-saver to the orphaned or abandoned child. In northern Italy between 1300 and 1550, most middle-class infants were sent away from home into the arms of a wet nurse, or balia. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's argument that it is unnatural for mothers to send their children away to a wet nurse reveals an interesting psychological observation. A sexual conflict in adulthood that Rousseau experienced runs through many accounts of the lives of those whose mothers either died in childbirth or who were farmed out to wet nurses. One reason may be that the wet nurse seldom stays with the child into adulthood, and therefore she can become an imaginary figure in the internal world, either despised for her abandonment or searched for in the streets of desire.
