The Nourishment that Nature Provides: Women’s Networks, Wet Nursing, and Infant Welfare in Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati

lIThe Nourishment that Nature Provides": Women's Networi(sl1 Wet Nursing, and Infant Welfare in NineteenthCentury Cincinnati M. Christine Anderson When the Cincinnati Orphan Asylum (COA) opened in 1833, its lady managers were unprepared to meet the difficult and time-consuming tasks involved in caring for infants-that is, children under one year of age. Yet, for two decades, the COA was apparently the only institution in Cincinnati caring for orphaned and abandoned infants, and its managers scoured the city for women willing and able to wet Hazel G. Clark, Superintendent of Maple Knoll Home of the Friendless (from CHS collection) Spring 2001 nurse babies who would almost certainly die unless a source of human milk could be found for them. These efforts were unusual both because of their relative success con1.pared to foundling hospitals in other American cities and because they were undertaken exclusively by benevolent women independent of male medical or political supervision. In the walking city of the I830S and I840s, the COA's elite man- "The Nourishment that Nature Provides" 15 Good Samaritan Hospital (from CHS collection) agers forged informal networks with working-class wet nurses and with poor single mothers who had abandoned their infant children.I In doing so, the lady managers often crossed class and ethnic lines that had so recently begun to divide Cincinnati. One way to understand the actions of the managers of the COA may be found in the work of historians of American warnen and their studies of white, Protestant wonlen's voluntary activism in the nineteenth century. Beginning with Nancy Cott's pathbreaking analysis, The Bonds of Womanhood, this strand of scholarship has shown how women's domestic, or so-called private, sphere paradoxically moved them into public, benevolent and reform organizing. Examining Rochester, New York, Nancy Hewitt, for example, has shown how organized voluntarism allowed activist women to create satisfying, though unpaid, careers in social service, despite distinctions among what Hewitt classifies as their benevolent, reformist, or ultraist orientations. More recently, in Women and the Wmk of Benevolence, Lori Ginzberg has focused on women's roles in a growing bureaucratization and politicization of benevolence in the late nineteenth century.2 The COA's managers, too, built life-long careers, expandr6 ing the skills and values of mOlherhood and domesticity into broader responsibility for their city's poor and orphaned children. Almost completely divorced from histories of the motives and implications of nineteenth-century white women's voluntarism, a second strand of historical scholarship has investigated wet nursing and infant welfare. The most comprehensive work in this field is Janet Golden's Social History of Wet Nursing: From Breast to Bottle, whose chronological outline of institutional infant welfare mirrors changing local practices at the COA. In Golden's account, provision for infant welfare declined as nineteenth-century foundling hospitals and infant asylums increasingly turned from "abroad" wet nurses-working-class women who took individual infants into their own homes-to vulnerable and poarly-paid resident wet nurses, often single mothers who nursed several children at a time within an institution. This new practice , which was championed by medical doctors, provided inadequate nutrition and care, with disastrous consequences for both foundlings and the biological children of wet nurses.3 As an explanation of the changing role of the COA in urban infant care, the focus on the intervenOhio Valley History tion of medical professionals appears to be an alternative to an explanation based on histories of nineteenth -century female activism. In fact, however, the two models are complementary. Growth and consolidation of urban political power in a broadening range of government institutions went hand in hand with increasing class and ethnic segregation in addition to professional specialization: all represented trends toward a more fragm.ented and bureaucratic society. Examining the initial success and subsequent failure of the COA's inventive response to one of the most intractable nineteenth-century urban problems makes it possible to integrate these separate interpretive approaches and to offer a fuller, more complex understanding of w<;nnen's voluntarism and relationships among women across class and ethnic lines. The COA originated in r832 among the benevolent warnen of Cincinnati's Female Auxiliary Bible Society who visited the city's poor during twin disasters -a devastating flood as well as the nation's first cholera epidemic. In doing so, they discovered orphans with no one to care for them.4 Although operating a quasi-public institution which required them to obtain funding from township trustees and solicit subscriptions from private citizens-novel public roles indeed'for the lady managers-their outward conform.ity to social prescriptions for middle and upper-class women garnered support and funds from elite men in the community.5 By the eve of the Civil War, the COA was one of six local, private childcare institutions reflecting religious, ethnic, and racial divisions in the city. 6 The Cincinnati Infirmary or poor farm, however, also admitted pauper children from its creation in r853 until r884, and it would challenge the COA's quasi-public status in the r850S and contribute to its demise as a provider of infant welfare. Nevertheless the needs of orphaned and poor children insured that the COA cared for several thousand children throughout the nineteenth century, often admitting over roo children a year. Pmtestant, respectable, and well-to-do, the middle -aged female reformers of the COA expected to use skills acquired as mothers and managers of large households to create a surrogate home for orphans.? Among the COA's twelve original managers were .Clarissa Davies, wife of mayor Samuel Davies who had sold the city its waterworks in r827; Rebecca Burnet, whose husband Jacob was a justice of the Ohio Supreme Court and later a United States senaSpring 2001 tor; Sarah Worthington King, wife of former state senator Edward King and daughter of Ohio's first governor ; and Mrs. Jared Mansfield, widow of the Surveyor General of the Northwest Territory. Husbands of other original rnanagers were solid, prosperous men including two physicians, an attorney, a banker, and three merchants. Many of these men participated in a web of business, political, and civic activities that paralleled their wives' Protestant benevolence and whose substance and visibility lent implied authority to the managers' efforts on behalf of their asylum.8 Of the first managers who can be traced through the manuscript census and city directories, all were married or widowed, and most were middle-aged: two were in their early fifies, two in their forties, two in their thirties, and only one in her twenties. More than half were responsible for households composed of between six and ten residents, including youngsters and grown children, as well as servants. One, Louisa Staughton, widow of surgeon John, operated a fenule seminary. Yet, despite their obvious skills and experience, the managers were nearly overwhelmed by crises during the asylum's early years. Orphans, as well as children whose parents were living but too poor to support them, crowded an inadequate facility, formerly a hospital for cholera victims. The nunagers had difficulty procuring even mille or eating utensils. They bickered among them.selves in the face of conflicts with an overworked, and some managers believed, recalcitrant staff. Medical problems affecting the children included "bowel complaint," whooping cough, chicken pox, and the ubiquitous conditions of institutionalized children: "sore eye" and "itch."9 The asylum. ran more smoothly in later years, but disputes among domestic staff, disease, and infant care continued to provoke crises demanding improvised solutions. The first reference to an infant at the COA appeared in June r834, as the managers were making elaborate preparations for the institution's first anniversary prognun at Lym.an Beecher's Second Presbyterian Church. Presenting a clean, wellbehaved "family of orphans" as evidence of their success at this first public exhibition was essential for the asylum-'s reputation and continued solvency,Io Preoccupied, the managers apparently attempted to artificially feed, or "hand feed" a three-week-old baby, and placed it along with the other children in a crowded church ceremony. It died the next day. "The Nourishment that Nature Provides" When two more infants arrived at the asylum the following week, the visiting committee placed them with wet nurses living outside the asylum. Lacking any model or precedent for their decision, the committee defended its actions by arguing, "although the expense will be considerable, the com.[sic] think the lives of two human beings who must otherwise have perished, sufficiently justify the plan adopted."II Hiring wet nurses who lived outside the asylum became a common practice thereafter. Between IS34 and IS46, the asylum employed at least thirty wet nurses.r2 By the IS40s, the managers spent roughly $400 a year to pay wet nurses, and in ISSO and ISSI expenses for "wet nurses outside the Asylum" peaked at over $I,200 annually.I3 It is impossible to trace the economic and social status of these wet nurses, but their reliance on the wages they were paid for wet nursing and the managers' comments suggest they were members of the antebellum working classes, often in precarious economic circumstances, and at least some are known to have been Irish or German immigrants. A broad spectrum of Cincinnatians accepted the COA as the organization responsible for infant welfare in the city. No lying-in hospital or infant asylum existed until the ISS os. Poor won1.en sometimes gavc birth at the Commercial Hospital, which cared for the indigent sicki but only rarely did the hospital admit motherless infants or nursing mothers. Thus public officials, mothers unable to care for their own infant children, and others who found infants in alleys, sheds, or at the doors of their residences turned to the COA. Even Roman Catholic Bishop John Purcell, known as a strong supporter of autonomous Catholic institutions-including two asylums run by the Sisters of Charity-relied on the Protestant "ladies." In IS47, he left an abandoned infant with the Township Trustees who turned it over to the COA.r4 Although European nuns operated foundling hospitals , strains on overburdened diocesan charities, as well as fear of encouraging sexual immorality and abandonment, prevented creation of a Catholic infant asylum in Cincinnati until IS73.I5 Such fears may have been justified, considering the enormous numbers of children abandoned at European foundling asylums.r6 Nevertheless, the COA's managers resented what they saw as the imposition on them of a burdensome responsibility, even making a snide (but private) reference to the"Bishop's baby" in their IS ,\ Archbishop John B. Purcell (from CHS collection) committee report, although Bishop Purcell was certainly not the child's father. I7 Perhaps such diverse Cincinnatians relied on the COA for infant care because they assumed that hiring and supervising wet nurses were part of a well-to-do housewife's repertoire of domestic skills. The practice was well known and widely practiced in Cincinnati at mid-century. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe hired wet nurses for several of her children. In IS33 and IS34, Stowe's sister Catharine Beecher was a close associate of COA managers Sarah King, whose husband Edward was a distant cousin of the Beechers, and Rebecca Burnet, a prominent member of Lyman Beecher's Second Presbyterian Church.r8 In IS38, Stowe boarded one of her twin daughters with a wet nurse living in the congested basin district of the central citYi and in I8so she hired an Irish wet nurse who stayed in her own home. I 9 Historian Janet Golden notes that although physicians discouraged hiring wet nurses, they did not seem to expect middle- and upper-class women to follow their advice. Cincinnati Ohio Valley History I I I I --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------physician John Eberle included such a "long list of exemptions" in his 1833 Treatise on the Diseases and Physical Education of Children that won1.en consulting his advice manual could easily justify hiring wet nurses.20 Yet there was criticism of the practice of hiring wet nurses in Cincinnati. For instance! physician John L. Vattier of the Cincinnati Dispensary and Vaccine Institution vituperated about "the submission of infants to the breast of another ... a perversion of natural affection/ a practice that! he believed! deprived children of maternal influence. The publisher of the Cincinnati Daily Times, Calvin Starbucl<:.:! also denounced the practice! especially among benevolent women who neglected their own children in their "prosecution of vain! fanciful! and visionary schemes of public good/ thus causing every sort of immorality! !!in a word! the notorious! universal! and admitted profligacy and corruption! which stalks unrebuked throughout the land/'2I The managers at the COA were not entirely willing providers of infant care. While they were occasionally sympathetic to the desperation of single mothers, their hostility to "unnatural" mothers and, in a few instances, fathers who abandoned infants was usually intens~. In 1844, for example, when a two-month-old was left at the asylum in a basket, the managers noted, "how sad to think, that there are females in the world worse than the brute creation, what Mother could behold that poor little thing crying for the nourishment that nature provides for it without seeking for some one to supply the place of its unnatural mother."22 It was difficult to distinguish between abandonment and intentional infanticide , although historian Shurlee Swain has suggested an important distinction between infants left in poor condition in places where they were unlikely to be found and those left well tended, sometimes in baskets or with notes, where responsible people would notice them.23 Managers rarely made such distinctions , however, and were suspicious of parents who left notes with foundlings attempting to communicate their respectability or concern. In contrast to "unnatural mothers!' who "imposed" their infants on the asylum, wet nurses who insured infants' survival were the managers' allies. The managers often tried to find the mothers of foundlings and force them to fulfill their obligations. Those suspected of trying to leave infants at the asySpring 200I lum had to allay the managers' suspicions of their motives. Their defenses and the managers' responses reveal the personal, individual negotiations among women that accompanied the COA's provision for infant welfare. In 1857, "a miserable looking woman" brought a hungry and neglected infant only a few weeks old to the asylum, claiming she had found it in her shed. Although the managers were initially skeptical, they concluded that she was telling the truth when "she was examined & found not to be the mother."24 It is unclear what the writer meant by "examined/ but the woman successfully asserted her own version of events. Another woman apprehended leaving an infant in the orphanage yard was taken before the mayor, whom she told that the child's mother was a fifteen-year-old girl who had been forced from her home by her enraged father after giving birth to the baby, purportedly fathered by "a Gentleman who boarded at a fashionable Hotel."25 Whether or not the story was true, she posed a counternarrative to the managers' accounts of "unnatural mothers." In her tale, she was a well-meaning female friend to a young woman who had been abused by a wealthy"gentleman" and rejected by a working-class father attempting to maintain his family's respectability.26 The managers may not have believed her, but she did achieve her goal. The infant became the responsibility of the COA. Visiting committee reports hint that both managers and lower-class women shared anger at male irresponsibility, as well as experiences of responsibility for children. In one instance, a wet nurse cooperated with the "ladies" to enforce a working man's obligations to his infant after it was left on the asyhun 's doorstep. Before the baby could be taken to a wet nurse, "a fortunate incident revealed the unnatural father" when a woman seeking employment as a wet nurse recognized the infant as having been wet nursed by someone she knew. According to the nurse, "The mother was a hired girl, or seamstress, the father a plasterer, not manied; he had hired the person to nurse it, and owed her $45. The evening previous, he took the child away from her, telling her he had found a lady who would adopt it." The managers arranged to have the "unnatural father ... dealt with by the law." Both they and the wet nurse seemed more hostile to him than to the mother, who was almost invisible except for her poverty, but it is impossible to tell how much their varying interpreta- "The Nourishment that Nature Provides" I9 tions of his actions coincided. The wet nurse may have been motivated to name him. from resentment because he had cheated a neighbor who was providing a service for which she, too, expected to be paid. Nevertheless, the managers were sympathetic rather than suspicious and assumed that they and both wet nurses had a comnlon interest in the infant's welfare, returning it to its nurse and promising to see to it that she would be paid.27 In such individual encounters, the managers could be sympathetic to women of lower status than themselves if the latter's accounts of events resonated with the managers' experiences and values. In short, the managers applied negative judgments based on individual behavior, rather than categories based on economic status, or even sexual conduct. Women who could conform to the eOA managers ' expectations might gain material aid as well as sympathy for their difficulties. In IS 55, Bridget, a former wet nurse, returned to the asylum, "promising to make herself useful with a needle or in the nurserywithout remuneration if only permitted to have a home-until she could find another situation." The managers let her remain, despite their belief that "it is certain she had been deceived-and decoyed into a house of ill fam.e."28 Although they cast Bridget as a victim in an urban sexual drama, she may have rnanipulated their preconceptions. It is unclear whether she was as vulnerable as the managers believed or an active agent using the asylum as a resource enabling her to achieve her own ends. Ironically, women less able to shape the managers' narratives for their own purposes sometimes left a clearer record of their desperation. One infant was left at the asylum by a woman who claimed to be its aunt, only to reappear two days later, saying the child was hers. Her child had already been adopted however , "and on being told that the child had been taken she became outrageous ... declaring that she would never leave the house until the child should be restored to her-believing that it was concealed somewhere about the house."2 9 Finding women who were both capable of and willing to become wet nurses for numerous infants on an unpredictable basis also involved the managers in complex personal negotiations across class lines. Physical ability to nurse depended on a woman's own reproductive cycle: a wom.an about to wean a child or who had lost an infant could continue nursing anoth20 Sketch by Christine Breden, from the Commercial Gazette, November 12,1893 (from C;HS collection) er. One already nursing her own child might be able to feed an additional infant as well, although few women were well-nourished enough to do so successfully . Wet nurses living abroad tended to resist nursing multiple infants, but some adjusted their ability to breastfeed for a fee by sequentially suckling one infant after another.3° Biological ability to be a wet nurse was not the only issue, however. A wet nurse had to be willing to exchange her biological capacity to feed an infant for a cash wage, usually between one and two dollars a week. For a poor or working-class woman, this would be a useful addition to the family economy and a way to earn while she stayed in her own household. But since wet nursing was a form of paid employment closely related to domestic service or medical nursing, it would rarely have appealed to women of secure means)I Local newspapers carried advertisements for wet nurses, but the managers never utilized these, relying instead on informal networks for references, often walking through the city asking for information and knocking on doors to find nurses. Visiting commitOhio Valley History I \ tees sometimes reported having "heard of a woman" who might be hired as nurse, though such leads could easily be dead ends. The lives of infants deprived of breast milk were precarious, forcing the managers to make hasty judgments. For example, when the asylum was especially hard-pressed to care for at least eight infants, a committee left a baby with"some person who lives next door to a Mrs. Wilson who has one of our children."32 Potential nurses were sometimes reluctant to take infants from the asylum. When a baby was abandoned at the orphanage late on a Saturday night, the matron's sister offered to nurse it until a paid nurse could be found. She returned the child when she discovered it had a sore mouth, "afraid to keep it-lest her own child should take the disease."33 Another woman refused to take a child because "her own ... was too cross [?J to permit her to take another."34 The managers generally accepted such judgments, as when they requested a nurse to take a second infant from the asylum in January r856. She "wisely said no one woman could do justice to two babies." As the infant the asylum had already placed with her Ilhad ... given her some wakeful nightsl we feared to press the matter."35 Thus, as they traversed the city in search of wet nurses for infants who literally landed on their doorstepi the managers entered the homes of women poorer than themselves and discussed the concrete practical and medical aspects of motherhood. Although their standards did not always coincide-in r847 the matron refused to place a child with a wet nurse because she was "disgustedl' with her dirty house-the managers were nevertheless familiar with, and even shared, knowledge and concerns about methods of infant care with women very different from themselves,36 The process of finding, paying, and visiting wet nurses involved COA managers in a tangle of relationships with nurses and their families throughout the city. In the asylum's second year a committee reported finding a baby at nurse I'in a very uncleanly condition,-afterwards, when their visits were expected, more care was evidently bestowed upon the child's appearance."37 Some nurses may have found the managers' unannounced visits intrusive, but others m.ay have seen them as an opportunity to obtain further benefits for their families. One committee found the nurse's family Iidestitute and ill" and brought her groceries. Several weeks later the child was Ilmuch improved. The nurse complains that the Spring 2001 ladies do not visit her as she expected they would/'38 COA managers hoped wet nurses would replace the maternal solicitude so-called unnatural mothers had withdrawn from their infants. Their experiences and position as directors of the asylum were based on the fact that almost all of them were mothers themselves . Reflecting the rising status of motherhood among the middle and upper classes, they tended to glorify motherhood and extended this vision to include those they hired as wet nurses for the asylum .39 Occasionally nurses adopted infants they cared for.4° Yet some wet nurses did not meet the maternal ideall and committees discovered instances of abuse regularly, if not often. In r8491 a committee visited a child at nurse for the first time in three months after receiving information that it was Ilbadly treated." They found it Ilin a worse condition even than had been reported-it was imaceated[sic} its bowels much swollen-& its little face black & blue from bruises received we know not how." The nurse blamed the managers for not visiting more often. The managers did not excuse her, but they did acknowledge some truth to her claim and IIdeterm-ined to visit our babes at nurse more frequently."41 This chore taxed the managers' time and energy. Careful supervision required nuanced judgements because the behavior of wet nurses was ordinarily more ambiguous than either outright abuse or romanticized maternalism. Some paid nurses, for example, protested when managers weaned infants, perhaps because they had something to gain if they could persuade the managers to continue paying them. One nurse and her husband wished to I'adopt as their own'l a baby the woman had been·nursing, if COA managers would pay her for an additional six months. Unmoved, the managers sent her homel saying that if she could not convince her husband to adopt the infant without pay, she should bring it back to the asylum.42 But the managers postponed weaning a child placed with another nurse 'Iwho proffessed [sic} a strong atachment[sic}" to it because I'the child is fleshy but does not appear well-perhaps it would be well to remain through the coming summer."43 The managers may have believed the nurse was sincere because she lowered her wages, but their decision was also shaped by an awareness that breastfeeding protected infants from intestinal infections, vari0usly called summer complaint or cholera infantuml which were particularly common in hot weather.44 "The Nourishment that Nature ProvidesII 2r Such practical considerations, as well as their evaluation of wet nurses' motives, prompted the managers' particularistic decisions regarding individual wet nurses.45 Particularism reflected the variety the managers encountered among the nurses they hired. On one hand, wet nursing was a relatively convenient form of wage labor for poor women, and it is not surprising that some ignored or resented infants they took into their homes as an economic expedient. On the other hand, nurses and their families could become attached to infants placed with them, even when it "lmdercut their economic self-interest.46 This range of responses from wet nurses is illustrated by a set of events triggered by the desire of Dr. L- and his wife to adopt an infant following the death of their own baby in .r849. Mrs. B-, the nurse of the child selected for adoption, "evince[d] a determination not to part with it." "Appreciating her feelings in some n1.easure" and feeling /I an unwillingness to resort to anything like severity/' the committee set off to find the nurse and convince her that adoption was in the child's best interests. Mrs. B- "was not to be found/' although the committee went to her sister's home and even returned to the wet nurse's home at night. Finally "Mr. B- ... said his wife and child were in the country & that neither the Ladies nor the Law should separate them." Claiming not to be "intimidated by threats/, the "ladies" nevertheless decided to give Dr. and Mrs. L- another infant at nurse in the outlying community of Cumminsville. Arriving there, they found this nurse had been ill and unable to breastfeed for several weeks, and "no tears were shed at the parting."47 Having traveled hither and yon through the course of the day, the visiting committee had had two unsatisfactory experiences, but for very different reasons in each case: in one the nurse had, in fact, become her nursling's surrogate mother, in the other the nurse was apparently culpably unmaternal. Given the difficulties in supervising nurses living abroad, the COA managers sought women who would live in the asylum, especially as the number of infants at nurse and expenses rose. Therefore in r849 and r85r, the managers began sporadic efforts to consolidate infant care within the asylum. But when they attempted to implement the new policy, they discovered that nurses "yielded with great ... reluctance ." One nurse "bathed in tears" convinced the committee that she was "in delicate health & afraid 22 to wean ... [the infant] now for fear it would throw her into decline" and was permitted to keep the child for a reduced fee of $1.25 a week.48 The vulnerability of poor mothers alone in the city, however, was sometimes a stroke of luck for the managers. For instance, a poor German woman was an unsatisfactory laundress at the asylum because she devoted all her time to the infant she brought with her, but she did not leave immediately because she spoke little English, and the man who had brought her to the asylum failed to return for her. The managers soon discovered that she could be useful in another way, reporting that she nursed an infant left at the asylum, "& it secures its nourishment as from its own mother 's Fountain." When two more infants entered the asylum in March, she nursed them as well: "She seems to have nourishment for them all, and shows great willingness to devote herself to them."49 Breastfeeding three infants at the same time was no less work than doing laundry, and there is no reason to doubt the woman's devotion was genuine. Nevertheless, her new position had real benefits for her, enabling her to care for her own infant, while also offering temporary economic security. Few women who could lrely on a male wage earner were willing to wet nurse in the asylum, and therefore most of the asylum's wet nurses were single mothers. Some unmarried mothers accepted wet nursing positions only as a way to keep their own children. They often lacked interest in the children they were paid to nurse. In October r848, for example , the managers hired the mother of a nine-weekold infant, but they became dissatisfied because "she devotes too much time to her own infant," ignoring the child she was paid to nurse.50 She was replaced by a nurse, probably also a single mother, who had given birth at the hospital and had given her baby up for adoption before coming to the asylum. When she had the opportunity to have her own infant returned to her, she was "very anxious to remain and says if she could only have her own child there, she could work half the night." Reunited with her biological child, she successfully nursed two babies without hand feeding either of them,5I Probably this was the same nurse, Margaret, who gave up her baby six months later to a woman who came to the asylum to adopt a child and chose a wet nurse's infant. The woman "urged the mother to give it to her,-[t]o our great astonishment she did so, and the new mother Ohio Valley History bore off her prize most triumphantly, poor Margaret wept bitterly as they left the house, ... [she] said she could not take such good care of it as Mrs. S-."5 2 Margaret faced bitter choices as a poor woman alone with little chance of supporting herself with a child. Had she not given up her infant, she might have been forced to leave it at the asylum, where it would probably have been placed for adoption by the managers. As it was, she could at least choose the adoptive mother herself. While wet nursing in the asylum_ temporarily solved a single mother's problems, as it did for the German woman and Margaret, it precluded personal autonomy. Tension between freedom and her infant's welfare may have caused one wet nurse to abscond from the asylum in 1838. "[S]he left her babe [at the Asylum] to go after its clothes" promising to return. Instead, she sent a friend to the asylum the next day who "said the mother was very ill, and grieved very n1.uch that she could not come to her infant." When the managers found and confronted the mother, she cried and told them that "she had been persuaded by her friends to [leave] ... [and] acknowledged that she had never been married." The managers refused to let her return, not because she was unmarried, but because they had lost "confidence [in her] by her duplicity." The committee now faced the problem of finding yet another wet nurse for the infant in the asylum. Unfortunately for the next week's committee , the nurse they fOl.1nd refused to stay at the asylum , despite what the managers perceived as "all the comforts of such a delightful home," preferring instead to be paid to nurse the infant abroad.53 The managers saw themselves as offering a haven for a single mother and her infant, but for the mother life in the asylum under constant supervision must have seemed oppressive. In spite of such difficulties, by the mid-1850S asylum wet nurses had begun to replace abroad wet nurses employed by the COA. An unintended consequence of this change was worsening infant mortality . Admission and dismissal ledgers are so unreliable that it is impossible to ascertain how many infants survived under the care of the COA, but instances of infants nursed through their first year by wet nurses liVing abroad in the 1830S and 1840S suggest that the institution did save lives.54 By the end of the 1850S, however, both published and unpublished records focused on the death of infants in the asylum, and Spring 200I almost no infants survived institutional care. Infants separated from their mothers generally fared poorly in the nineteenth century, but congregate care increased exposure to infectious diseases, the primary cause of infant death. Asylum wet nurses were also more likely than those living abroad to nurse several infants at once as well as sequentially. Consequently, infants they nursed received less breast milk and were more likely to receive impure artificial food. By 1862, the managers had completely abandoned employment of wet nurses, and all infants were bottle fed. Infants continued to die, although in smaller numbers as admissions of infants fell, virtually ending by 1870. Visiting committee reports suggest the texture of such experiences in the asylum. In June 1859, after at least two infants had died from cholera infantum, a committee noted that"so many of our babes have died that it leaves our nurses with less to do, but ... we had better retain them all for the present-in case of a contingency."55 Two more infants died in July, but in August the managers hired a pair of additional wet nurses because two of the remaining babies needed more food. "However," the managers noted, "it seems almost impossible to save some of them, they are so rundown in this warm weather.//5 6 Indeed, both infants died the following week, leaving the next committee to reflect on the causes: "We do not mourn their departure, for had they lived, they would have possessed an inheritance of shame and sorrow, but we do regret our want of success in rearing infants-doubtless, much is owing to the parentage, and previous want of care, and much is owing to the inefficiency of the nurses to whom we are obliged to commit them."57 Arguably both pre-existing weakness, especially among foundlings, and wet nurses' tendency to favor their own children played a part in the series of infant deaths recorded in 1859, but the managers failed to acknowledge that asylum wet nursing itself was implicated in the deaths of even healthy babies who "lingered, gradually pining away. II 58 Given earlier problems in supervising wet nurses abroad, it is difficult to assess the extent to which the managers were fully aware of the consequences of institutional infant care. All indications are that they were genuinely troubled by the suffering they confronted, voting in 1859 to "try homeopathic practice in the infant department.... Most of the ladies think there could be no risk in making the change as there has been "The Nourishment that Nature Provides" 23 such great mortality am.ong the infants, and that they would suffer less from the treatment, if there was no other favorable result."S9 Little else changed, and when three infants entered the asylum in March r860, one wet nurse, Miss B-, was hired for all three.6o By August, four wet nurses cared for eleven infants. When another baby was admitted in September, the managers hired a fifth nurse, although it appears that at least some infants were partially or entirely bottle fed. 6I Initially, the managers reported that "all are doing well" though the wet nurses "find but very little leisure time."62 But by October, the COA managers recognized that "the babies are not thriving" and complained, "the nurses do not seem to take the same care of them as they do there[sic] own." Through the winter and spring the infants weakened, and at least six died. In March, a committee lamented , "all seem to die under our hands."63 According to the June r86r Annual Report, thirteen foundlings had been admitted in the previous year, but most died within six months.64 Changing wet nursing practices entailed costs for women who nursed in both institutions and private homes after mid-century, as well as for their infants. In r860 the COA admitted three infants whose mothers took private employment as wet nurses. The first, whose mother had "gone to New York to nurse a lady's child/' was one of two infants Miss B- was nursing at the time. Six weeks later, the other infant had died, and the managers notified the mother in New York that her child was ill. By August it was recovering, but it is not known whether it survived.6s Meanwhile, the asylum admitted "several infants who were thrown upon us-not by compulsion-but where humanity would dictate, to assist willing mothers to help support themselves and their children. A wet nurse was procured with the hope that their lives might be saved. But this is doubtful-as the weather is so warm, and the children so very feeble."66 But as deaths mounted, the behavior of the wet nurses chronically disrupted the asylum. In November, a committee alleged that, "they drink and abuse each other and neglect the children."67 Later committees mentioned two wet nurses who separately left the asylum and returned drunk Neither was dismissed immediately, and both seemed dedicated and responsible when sober. Despite "the misfortune of not being able to resist her love of drink/, Mrs. M- "does her work so well and the babies thrive under her care."6B Bridget, who was sent to a hospital when she was found drunk in early December, was "indulging again" in January. She was soon "herself again" and "invaluable," but the managers feared that "she cannot be relied upon."69 Episodes of friction and intemperance among the domestic staff occurred often in the COA's history, but it seems worth asking whether the tensions and drinking among wet nurses during this period were related to the illness and death of so many infants. The generation of women who had founded the Cincinnati Orphan Asylum in robust middle age eventually entered old age. In r850, four of the original managers remained active. Their numbers continued to dwindle with the resignation of Elizabeth Hall in r853, and the death of long-time president Clarissa Davies in r862 and her successor Rebecca Burnet in r864. Catharine Bates, widow of a wholesale drug and paint dealer, alone survived, serving as president from r864 to r882, when she was 84. Although they continued to dedicate themselves to the asylum until well into old age, ceaseless visits to wet nurses in the city and its epvirons became more taxing for them. The younger women who replaced them were probably less accustomed to hiring wet nurses living abroad than the original cohort. They, too, were for the most part wives of substantial merchants and professional men. One, Caroline Stille, ran a boarding house, but by the r850s and r860s, the COA managers also include~ Elizabeth Jones, wife of a wealthy merchant and civic activist, and Julia Probasco, married to the successful hardware merchant Henry. Increasing class and ethnic segregation of Cincinnati's growing population may have added to their reluctance to seek out and visit wet nurses in poor and working-class districts)O Yet, demands on the managers continued. "You might suppose that the public think we are all wet nurses from the quantity of infants that come to us/, complained exasperated managers in r852.7I Another factor in the COA's declining role in foundling care was the creation of a new municipal Infirmary or poor fann in r853. As part of a general enlargement of the role of city government in providing for and regulating the urban poor, the poor farm marked a shift from outdoor to indoor relief. Subsidies for individual paupers, which township Ohio Valley History .... trustees had earlier dispensed on recommendations from_ reputable citizens, were now controlled by the Infirmary that housed and supervised the poor. With this change, the COA ceased to be a quasi-public institution receiving stipends from the township trustees to care for pauper children, including foundlings. The managers unsuccessfully disputed the loss of funding for their enterprise. Although the new system offered to relieve them of the burdensome responsibilities involved in hiring wet nurses, the Infirnury represented a fundamental shift toward a more punitive and bureaucratic response to poverty. According to Cincinnati historian Alan Marcus, the Infirmary reflected growing social estrangement in the city as respect~ble Cincinnatians and reformers came to see poverty and public health problems as the result of a "plague of strangers" and turned to municipal government for solutions.72 Anxious to minimize expenses and unsympathetic to those who abused charity, the Infirmary stressed immigration and illegitimacy as causes for admission of foundlings and single mothers. Directors promised "fearlessly" to take action against fathers of children born outside of marriage, charging that previous "want of action ... [offered] as with a card of invitation, a comfortable seclusion for the guilty, ... eventually throwing open our charity asylums as homes for the abandoned offspring ."73 It is unclear how many nursing mothers passed through the Infirmary, but large numbers of infant deaths indicate that it played a significant role in foundling care until state law removed all children from almshouses in r884.74 Throughout this period, physicians at the Infirmary acknowledged that foundlings died because they had lost "the natural element-the maternal breast/' but they also blamed parents' moral and physical defects. "The only inheritance that many of these poor unfortunate children bring us is a diseased constitution-the result of a father's sin or a mother's shame/, argued one physician in 1884. Having thus categorized such parents as unworthy, he concluded, "But these are evils which will always exist, and efforts at reform on our part are useless."75 Unlike the COA managers of the r830s and r 840s, the Infirmary directors and physicians emphasized a perceived link between poverty and deviance from sexual norms, rather than judging individual circumstances. In his first annual report the superintendent of the Infirmary not only charged that the COA was Spring 2001 extravagant in its use of public funds but also argued that the Infirmary was a "superior [institution] especially for nursing infants."76 The next year, in a more oblique reference, he charged that the well-to-do were often deceived "by acquaintance with a specimen of a certain class of poor folks whom they have visited in their lowly abodes." "Benevolent ladies of distinction in the city" were especially culpable for sending on to public charities"a class of poor females, whom the inmates denominate as poor-house lady boarders ... [who] bring with them inflated notions of their superiority."77 These public statements marked a shift in both discourse about and treatment of the poor wom_en who were so often single and/or abandoning mothers as well as institutional wet nurses. While the managers of the COA were not unfamiliar with the representations of these women promoted by the Infirmary, they had applied these judgements not to a category of women but, rather, to women as individuals. Rail as they might against "unnatural mothers" or the faults of institutional wet nurses, as a practical matter, concealed from public view, they responded to the specific information kpown to them through their encounters with particular women. Despite its criticism of the COA's approach toward aiding the poor, especially the infant children of unmarried mothers, the Infirmary became a resource for the COA in its search for wet nurses, speeding its transition from abroad to institutional wet nursing. Another new urban institution, the Home of the Friendless, founded by a separate group of Protestant benevolent women in r854, also provided wet nurses to the asylum. A shelter for women, the Home of the Friendless offered temporary care to some poor nursing mothers-married and unmarried -and to foundlings. These two institutions became the primary sources of asylum wet nurses during the r850s. By the time the Home of the Friendless made its mission as a maternity home explicit in the r880s, a second maternity hospital, St. Joseph's Infant Asylum, operated by the Catholic Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, had opened ill r873 and already offered medical care and shelter to single mothers and foundlings. Cornplementing the Sisters' St. Joseph's Orphanage and their Good Samaritan Hospital, the infant asylum was founded by Sister Anthony O'Connell, who circumvented clerical objections to establishment of a Catholic foundling hospital by obtaining land from a sympathetic "The Nourishment that Nature Providesf! 25 Protestant philanthropist.78 Gradually, this complement of new institutions took over the COA's role in infant welfare. Mortality among babies separated fro111. their mothers remained high through the end of the nineteenth century, sometimes exceeding fifty percent at both institutions, even after the Home of the Friendless began sterilizing milk in 1889.79 A 1914 report, Illegitimacy in Cincinnati, recorded infant mortality of twenty percent among infants born to unmarried mothers, an improve111.ent over what any nineteenth-century institution accomplished. Nevertheless, these infants continued to die at double the rate of the children of Inarried women.so The reason for this appalling state of affairs lay in the fact that, in Cincinnati, institutional employment of wet nurses ended decades before there were safe alternatives to breastfeeding.Sr Here as elsewhere, physicians acknowledged the tragic results of bottle feeding , but they made no effort to reintroduce wet nursing for fOlll1dlings. s2 With government funds available only to the COA, and those withdrawn after 1853, and because of reluctance of local Catholics to establish an infant asylml1, a public Infirmary represented the only possible but clearly inadequate solution to the need for care for abandoned infants. The two new, religiously-oriented private maternity h0111.es emphasizing single motherhood rather than "The Rocking Chair Brigade" (from CHS collection) infant welfare, like the Infir111.ary, reflected a more specialized, less particularistic approach to social problems. Absence of safe artificial infant food made care of infants separated from their mothers, especially single mothers haunted by poverty and ostracis111., a persistent problem in nineteenth-century Anlerican cities. Relations among COA nunagers, wet nurses, and single mothers from the 1830S to the 1860s reveal hidden networks a111.ong wonlen who devised a temporary strategy to deal with this problem. Foundling care provided by the COA was imperfect at best. It challenged neither the economic and social limitations that led single mothers to abandon their babies nor the competing interests of women from different economic classes. Yet econo111.ic and ethnic integration of the antebellum walking city combined with the social practice of abroad wet nursing softened boundaries alTlOng urban women. This essential precondition opened possibilities for women to innovate in Cincinnati with relative success compared to the institutional approaches adopted elsewhere in nineteenth -century America. M. Christine Anderson is Assista~t Professor of History at Xavier University. Ohio Valley History .7 ( , ~ r r. On the walking city and its significance, see Zane Miller, Boss Cox's Cincinnati: U1'ban Politics in the Pwgxessive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). 2. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphe1'e" in New England, I780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, I790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 198I); Nancy Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, I984); and Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Wmk of BeneFolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Centmy United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 3. Janet Golden, A Social History of Wet Nmsing in Ame1'ica: Fl'Om BTeast to Bottle (New York: Cambridge University Press, I996). See also, Rima D. Apple, Mothe1's and Medicine: A Social Hist01'Y of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, I987). 4. Robert 1. Black, The Cincinnati 01'phan Asylum (Cincinnati: Published by the author, 1952), 13; Steven Edward Anders, "The History of Child Welfare in Cincinnati, 17901930 " (Ph.D. eliss., Miami University, I98I), 72-94. 5. Anne Firor Scott, Natmal Allies: Women's Associations in Ame1'ican Hist01'Y (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 3, 24; Hewitt, Women's ActiFism and Social Change, 43-55. On quasi-public institutions in antebellum cities, see Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wa1's: Democracy and Public Life in the Ame1'ican City dming the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), I04. 6. Anders, "Child Welfare in Cincinnati," lIS. 7. Anne M. Boylan, "Timid Girls, Venerable Widows and Dignified Matrons: Life Cycle Patterns Among Organized Women in New YoWk and Boston, 1797-1840," Ame1'ican Quarte1'ly 38 (1986): 784. 8. U. S. Federal Manuscript Censuses, I830, I840, Hamilton County; The Cincinnati Dixect01'Y fm the Yea1' 1834; ... to which is Appended a Statistical Account of the Towns of COFington and Newpo1't, Ky. (Cincinnati, I834); Black, Cincinnati Olphan Asylum, 13-23. Daniel Aaron calls them "the most prominent women of the community" in Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1819-1838 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, I992), rr6. 9. Anders, "Child Welfare in Cincinnati," 85-88, 91-94. ro. Black, Cincinnati Orphan Asylum, 31-32; Timothy A. Hacsi, Second Home: 01'phan Asylums and POOl' Families in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 58-61; Patricia T. Rooke and R. L. Schnell, "The Rise and Decline of British North American Protestant Orphans' Homes as Woman's Domain, I850-1930/' Atlantis 7 (I982): 26-27. II. Reports of Weekly Visiting Committees [hereafter VCR), Cincinnati Orphan Asylum [hereafter COA), vol. I, 9 and I6 June 1834, Papers of the Cincinnati Convalescent Hospital for Children, Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, Ohio. 12. Susanne M. DeBerry Cole, "Going to Market: Women's Work and the Market Economies of Antebellum Cincinnati, 1789-1860" (PhD. diss., Miami University, I997), 124. Cole bases her figures on Account Book, COA, vol. 77, 7 October 1834 to I October 1846. Using the same document, I have identified twenty-nine wet nurses with certainty, but any estimate is bound to be approximate because the account book is incomplete and difficult to interpret. 13· My estimates of expenses are based on Account Book, Spring 2001 COA, vol. 77, 7 October 1834 to I October 1846; and COA, Annual Report (1835), p. 8; Annual Report (1845), p. I2; Annual RepOl't (1848), p. 9; Annual Report (1849), p. IS; A11l]ual RepOl't (1850), p. IO; and Annual Repo1't (1851), p. 12 (all published in Cincinnati). Abroad wet nurses were not listed as a separate expense after 185 I. 14. VCR, vol. 5, 27 December 1847. John H. Lamott, Histo1'Y of the Archdiocese Cincinnati, I821'-I92I (Cincinnati: Frederick Pustet Company, 192I), 84-85. IS. Rachel Fuchs, Abandoned Childxen: Foundlings and Child Welfare in Nineteenth-Centll1'Y France (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984); Judith Metz, S.C., "ISO Years of Caring: The Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati/' Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 37 (1979): 162. I6. Valerie Fildes, Wet Nmsing: A History /l'Om Antiquity to the Pxesent (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 144-58. 17. VCR, vol. 5,20 January 1848. 18. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, I973), I09-IO. Beecher's friendships with these elite women soured quickly because of Beecher's eastern parochialism, not because of disputes over motherhood or domesticity. 19. Joan D. Hedrick, HalTiet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York Oxford University Press, I994), 131, ISS; Catharine Beecher to Mary Beecher Perkins, undated (1838), cited in Kathryn lUsh Sklar, "Introduction/, in Catharine Beecher, 1l:eatise on Domestic Economy (1841, reprint Schoken Books, 1977), viii and xvii, n. 5; and Golden, Social History, 49. 20. Golden, Social Histmy, 53, 45. 21. John 1. Vattier, M.D., "Health of the City/' Joumal of Health I (1845): 201; and Cincinnati Daily Commercial, 4 March 1844, p. 2; 7 March r844, p. 2; both cited in Alan I. Marcus, Plague of Strange1's: Social Gmups and the Origins of City Se1'Fices in Cincinnati, I819-I870, (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 76. 22. VCR, vol. 4, no date [probably October r844J. 23. Shurlee Swain with Renate Howe, Single Mothers and Tlleil" Children: Disposal, Punishment and SUl'viFal in Austmlia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995L II517 . Swain suggests publicity about abandonment offered a "script" for others to use to communicate their distress at separation from their infants. Roger Lane acknowledges the fine line between abandonment and infanticide and implies that antebellum courts were aware of this difficulty. Roger Lane, Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Mmder in Nineteenth-Centmy Philadelphia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979L 90-roo. 24. VCR, vol. 8, 25 January 1857. 25· VCR, vol. 7, 25 July 1853. 26. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, "'Ruined' Girls: Changing Community Responses to Illegitimacy in Upstate New York, r890-I920/' Journal of Social Histo1'Y 18 (1984): 258. 27. VCR, vol. 5, 26 July 1847. 28. VCR, vol. 8, 30 April 1855. 29· Ibid., I? September 1855. 30. Golden, Social History, rr6. 3I. Ibid., 99-IOO. According to Golden, abroad wet nurses were less likely than those in institutions to have living infants. Cincinnati wet nurses may have been more like rural wet nurses hired by the London Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century. Fildes, Wet Nmsing, 178-83. 32. VCR, vol. 6, IO May 1851. "The Nourishment that Nature Provides" 27 33. Ibid. This is the only example of a woman nursing an infant for the COA without pay. 34. VCR, vol. 5, no date [probably November 1848]. 35. VCR, vol. 8, 24 January 1856. 36. Ibid., 30 August 1847. 37. VCR, vol. I, 14 July 1834. 38. VCR, vol. 2, no date [probably March 1836], II April 1836. 39. Barbara Welter, liThe Cult of True Womanhood: 18201860 ," Ame1'ican Qumterly 18 (1966): 151-74. 40. Minutes of the Board of Lady Managers [hereafter, Minutes], COA, vol. 21, 21 May 1850. 4!. VCR, vol. 6, no date [probably November 1849]; I October 1850; 5 November 1850. 42. Ibid., 4 March I85!. 43. Ibid., 4 March 1850. 44. Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines, Fatal Years: Child MOl'tality in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 3. 45. Hacsi, Second Home, 62,78. 46. Golden, Social HistOl'Y, 58-60, IOO-IOI; and Fildes, Wet Nmsing, 186-87. 47. VCR, vol. 5, 29 January 1849. 48. Minutes, vol. 21, 3 December 1849, 6 May 1851; VCR, vol. 6,19 May I85!. 49. VCR, vol. 8, 8, 14, IS December 1856; 25 January and IS March 1857. 50. VCR, vol. 5, 16 October and 5 November 1848. Golden, Social HistOl'Y, 96-99. 5!. VCR, vol. 5,20 November 1848; II, 18 December 1848. 52. Ibid., 23 July 1849· 53. VCR, vol. 2, II, 18 June and I July 1838. 54. Harvey Levenstein, "'Best for Babies' or 'Preventable Infanticide'? The Controversy over Artificial Feeding of Infants in America, 1880-1920," Tournal of American History 70 (1983): 75-94· 55. VCR, vol. 9, no date [June 1859]. 56. Ibid., 24 July and 14 August 1859. 57. Ibid., 21 August 1859. 58. COA, Annual Report (Cincinnati, 1861), 5. 59. VCR, vol. 9, II September 1859. 60. Ibid., 18 March, 22 April, and 24 June 1860. 6!. VCR, vol. 9a, 28 August and [1] September 1860. On IS September, an infant IIfed on bottleII died. 62. Ibid., 28 August 1860. 63. Ibid., 3 March I86!. 64. COA, Annual RepOl't (Cincinnati, 1861), 6. It is unclear how many children of wet nurses died. 65. VCR, vol. 9, 22, 29 April, 17, 24 June 1860; vol. 9a, 19 August 1860. 66. VCR, vol. 9a, I July 1860. 67. Ibid., 5 November 1860. 68. Ibid., 6, 13 January 1861. 69. Ibid., 2 December 1860; 20 January I86!. She was finally dismissed during the week of 10 February 1861 for "again drinking to excess.II 70. U.S. Federal Manuscript Censuses, 1850, 1860, 1870, Hamilton County; Black, Cincinnati Orphan Asylum, 66-69, 72. On the challenges posed by greater urban class and ethnic segregation to the particularistic vision of antebellum women's benevolent organizations, see Sarah Deutsch, "Learning to Talk More Like a Man: Boston Women's Class-Bridging Organizations, 1870-1940," American HistOl'ical Review 97 (1992): 380-8!. 7!. VCR, vol. 6, I March 1852. 72. Alan I. Marcus, Plague of Strangers, II6. 73. Directors of the City Infirmary of the City of Cincinnati [hereafter DCIL Annual RepOl't (Cincinnati, 1854), 6. 74. Marian J. Morton, And Sin No Mom: Social Policy and Unwed Mothers in Cleveland, I855-I990 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 32-33. On infant death in the Infirmary, see Directors of the City Infirmary of the City of Cincinnati, Annual RepOl'ts (Cincinnati, 1854-I 884). 75. DCI, Annual Report (Cincinnati, 1884), 27. 76. DCI, Annual Report (Cincinnati, 1883), 13. 77. DCI, Annual Report (Cincinnati,I854)' 55-56. 78. Minutes of the Board, Home of the Friendless [hereafter HF], Maple Knoll Papers, CHS; and Judith Metz, S.c., "150 Years of Caring: The Sisters of Charity in Cincinnati," Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 37 (1979): 162; Mary Agnes McCann, The History of Mother Seton's Danghtel's: The Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, Ohio, I809-I9I7, vol. 2 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), 129,283-84; vol. 3, 6162 . 79. HF, Annual RepOl't (Cincinnati, 1889), la-II. Statistics for infant morality at these institutions are listed in Minutes of the Board, HF, Maple Knoll Papers, CHS; Annual RepOl'ts (Cincinnati, 1884-1900) and "Statistics for Burial Ground Information," St. Joseph's Infant Asylum, Box 107/1, Sisters of Charity Archives, Mt. St. Joseph, Ohio. 80. Helen S. Trounstine, Illegitimacy in Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1919), 196. 81. Peter Romanofsky, "Saving the Lives of the City's Foundlings: The Joint Committee and New York City Child Care Methods," New York HistOl'ical Society Quarterly 6r (1972): 49-81. Jacqueline H. Wolf, '"Mercenary Hirelings' or 'A Great Blessing'? Doctors' and Mothers' Conflicted Perceptions of Wet Nurses and the Ramifications for Infant Feeding in Chicago, 1871-1961," Tournai of Social History 33 (Fall 1999): 97-120; and Apple, Mothers and Medicine, 35-56. 82. Attitudes of Cincinnati physicians seem. similar to those described by Richard A. Meckel, Save the Babies: American Public Health RefOIm and the Prevention of Infant MOl'tality, I 850-I929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 30-3 I. Ohio Valley History ... :1 i. I i: ...