Wet-nurses and food disorders: notes from middle class Italy
between Eighteenth and Nineteenth century
The author advances an interpretative hypothesis for the several food
disorder that characterized the main illnesses of middle class women at the
end of the Eighteenth century, and in particular the onset of anorexy. Challenging
those interpretations that have linked together female fasts in different
eras and in different contexts, the author looks at the “positive” role of
that food that these women seemed to refuse so violently in their lives. The
outcome of this analysis seems to suggest that it existed a body of rules about
food tastes and appetites restricting women both in quality and quantity,
which became increasingly favourable to female loss of appetite. On the
other hand, in those same years, in a framework of domestic “competence”
that was (ideally) totalising, the new duties of the wet-nurse were becoming
more engaging for the woman, and, in practice, central to the definition of
female identity in the middle class.