Care Work and the Family in Catholic Reformation Tuscany∗

Abstract

This article examines the care work undertaken by wet-nurses employed by Florence’s foundling hospital, the Spedale degli Innocenti. Left in a basin outside the Innocenti, infants were nursed for a few days in the hospital before being assigned to the homes of wet-nurses living in the villages and remote sharecropped farms of rural Tuscany. Some wet-nurses committed ‘fraud’ — so labelled by the institution — by contriving to receive a wage for wet-nursing their own infants, covertly exchanging the infant delegated to them by the hospital in return for their own. Their ‘fraud’ allows us to challenge assumptions by both historians and feminist economists concerning commercialization and measurement of women’s work; historians might more critically reflect on the systems of monitoring and auditing women’s work that gave rise to our archives. Finally, by receiving a wage for mothering, these wet-nurses allow us to perceive the historical contingency of our most deeply naturalized assumptions about the nature of work and the family. Wet-nursing fraud reveals that definitions of work were always predicated upon concomitant definitions of the family.