Rio de Janeiro Wet Nurses Dataset: Enslaved and Free Women in Rio de Janeiro, 1850

The “Rio de Janeiro Wet-Nursing Database” (RJWND) comprises all advertisements for wet nurses for the year of 1850 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, extracted from the city’s main commercial newspaper, Jornal do Commercio. “Mercenary” wet nursing, what contemporaries called the practice of paying for other women to breastfeed their children, was a thriving market throughout the nineteenth century. Enslaved women comprised most wet nurses, with freed women of color and white immigrant women also working in the trade. More rarely, white Brazilian women whose newborns had died advertised their milk. We can draw several conclusions from this data. Most importantly, RJWND demonstrates the ubiquity of wet nursing in urban Brazil. All women participated in this activity, whether as elite mothers not breastfeeding their own children, or as free, freed, freed African, and enslaved women breastfeeding other women’s children. It also sheds light on how enslavers valued wet nurses both for their reproductive labors (wet nursing) and their productive outputs (cleaning, cooking).