THE EARLY YEARS

There were four possible attitudes towards the new born in the Seventeenth Century:

1) That the child is born with original sin and that the only hope of holding it in check is by the most ruthless suppression of its will, and by its total subordination to parents schoolmasters and others in authority.

2) That the child is born with a propensity towards neither good nor evil but that it is a 'clean page', malleable and open to being moulded by experience. John Earle observed in 1628 that the "childe is the best copy of Adam before he tasted of Eve or the apple...His soul is yet a white paper unscribbled with the observations of the world...he knows no evil."

3) The character and potentialities of the child are genetically determined at conception and that there is little that subsequent enviroment and educational efforts can do except to reinforce good habits and restrain the bad. This was of course fundamental to astrological theory, according to which both character and fate are largely determined by the position of the planets at the moment of birth. In practice C17th parents do not seem to have accepted on this assumption, despite a general faith in astrology. They continued to attempt to break the will of the child in the hope of re-moulding its character.

4) The fourth view was Utopia, that the child is born good and is only corrupted by its experience in society.

The earliest evidence of greater attention being paid to infants and children by parents was the, in England, to record upon tombs children who died in infancy. This began in the late Cl6th, very often on monuments erected decdades later. Infants were represented by tiny images wrapped in swaddling clothes, youths were children holding skulls. At Tettenhall in Staffordshire there is an Elizabethan tomb surrounded by images of no fewer than ten dead babies. There is also evidence that for the first time parents were beginning to recognise that each child, even if it lived for a few hours or days, had its own individuality. During the Middle Ages it had been common practice to give a new born infant the same name as an elder sibling, especially if it was the tradtional name for the head of the family. This devloped, in the C17th, to the more frequent custom of substitution - giving the new born the same name as one who had recently died. Even this had almost stopped by the late C18th, indicating a recognition that names were highly personal and could not be readily transferred from child to child.

SWADDLING

Indications of a trend towards a more child-orientated society can be found in many different areas. Special clothing, however, does not seem to be one of them. At birth the baby swaddled. This goes back to Roman times but was beginning to die out in the late C18th. Locke says of the practice "The child has hardly left the mother's womb, it has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs when it is deprived of its freedom. It is wrapped swaddling bands, laid down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out and its arms by its sides. It is wound round and round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it cannot move !". One of the most significant results of swaddling is that it prevents the mother or wet nurse from cuddling hugging and caressing the child.Recent research has shown that swaddled children are indeed more tranquil - sleeping a lot, crying little and with a reduced respiratory rates, and that there is little evidence of later physical or mental retardation due to the lack of early stimuli. However, in 1769 Dr Cadogan wrote to a mother on how her child was being treated in her absence by the wet nurse. "At the least annoyance which arises, he is hung from a nail like a bundle of old clothes and while, witout hurrying, the nurse attends to her business, the unfortunate one remains thus crucified. All who have been found in this situation had a purple face, the violently compressed chest not allowing the blood to circulate... the patient was believed to be tranquil because he did not have the strength to cry out."

NURSING

Although doctors had always advised against it had long been the custom of upper class mothers to put their children out to paid wet nurses. There were many reasons for this, one being that many mothers were unable to produce an adequate supply of milk, either due to exhaustion and sickness after childbirth or because of some congenital defect. For others breast feeding was a painful experience and in any case was seen as a nuisance, interfering with sleep and the normal round of social engagements. It was a task entirely without Socila prestige, many mothers were afraid it would spoil their figures and therefore their sexual attractiveness. Other tender mothers were prevented by the misplaced authority of the husband, partly so that the child would less less of a competitor for his wife's attention, but mainly so that he could have access to her sexual services. According to Galen, who was followed by many C17th doctors, "husbands ought not to sleep with nursing wives since 'Carnal Copulation' troubleth the blood and so in consequence the milk."

The Puritans, however, strongly reinforced the traditional advice of the medical profession and told mothers to feed their own children. They used the functional argument that nature provided women with breasts to supply milk. They used the medical argument that mother's milk was best and they used the ancient superstitious argument that by absorbing the milk of the wet nurse then babies would also pick up their lower class, probably evil, character traits. It is significant to note that those mothers who fed their own children regarded it as something to boast about, as if it were an unusual occurence. Benjamin Brand, who died in 1636, boasted that his wife bore him 12 children "all nursed with her unborrowed milk" - this inscribed on his tombstone.

A few of the many illustrations in Jenny Thompson's "THE OTHER ARMY" published by Partizan Press:

Larger Picture

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