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).里约热内卢乳母数据库（Rio de Janeiro Wet-Nursing Database，简称RJWND）收录了1850年巴西里约热内卢地区的全部乳母招聘广告，数据源自该市主流商业报纸《商业日报》（Jornal do Commercio）。“有偿乳育”——即当时人们所称的雇佣其他女性为自己子女哺乳的行为——在整个19世纪均为蓬勃发展的市场业态。彼时绝大多数乳母为被奴役女性，获得自由的有色人种女性与白人移民女性也参与该行业；更为少见的是，因新生儿夭折而对外提供母乳服务的巴西白人女性。通过该数据集可得出多项结论：最为关键的是，RJWND证实了乳育行为在巴西城市地区的普遍性。所有女性均参与其中：一类是选择不亲自哺乳自身子女的精英阶层母亲，另一类则是自由女性、获释非洲裔女性以及被奴役女性，她们为他人子女提供哺乳服务。此外，该数据集还揭示了奴隶主对乳母的双重价值评估：既重视其生育相关劳动（乳育工作），也认可其生产性产出，如清洁、烹饪等家务劳作。