OMG. Have you SEEN these vintage photos of Victorian women breastfeeding in public?

The first time I saw the Pinterest board of Period Breastfeeding Images, I had to do a double take. Yep, there they were — women of yesteryear all posing either for paintings or photographs while breastfeeding! It’s not just Victorian women, but those are the ones that I find most interesting, perhaps because we have such a stuffy vision of who a Victorian woman would have been, and unbuttoned and breastfeeding in public, for a photograph, doesn’t really conjure up in my mind as the first bullet point on that list of traits! And yet there they area.

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I found an article with the curator of the board that explains a bit further, saying, “as Jill Lepore explains in The Mansion of Happiness, […] in the mid-1800s, images of breastfeeding mothers became a fad in the U.S. The use of wet nurses had never been as common in the U.S. as in Europe, and it became even less popular by the early 1800s; breastfeeding your own child became a central measure of your worth as a mother. Cultural constructions of femininity became highly centered on motherhood and the special bond between a mother and her children in the Victorian era.”

So that’s on one hand a bit of a bummer; breastfeeding used as a way to measure the worth of a mother is not exactly my favorite thing! But it’s also such a lovely little peek into a side of historic life that’s (dare I say it) so often more hidden and buttoned up that I’m going to forgive them that — we all have our faults, after all.

Here are a few more of my favorites, but you should really take a peek at the whole board if you’re looking for some historic fist bumps from mamas of the past.