Shifting Discourses of Motherhood: The Victorian Breastfeeding Photo Fad

As daguerreotypes became available, women began to pose breastfeeding their infants, capturing them in this most essential of maternal roles.

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.