A Social History of Wet Nursing in America is an ambitious and prodigiously researched study which deals with an important phenomenon that has not been analyzed in its U.S.

context.

Janet Golden employs a wide range of sources - diaries and letters, institutional records, medical text, domestic advice volumes, newspapers and magazine articles, to name a few - to illuminate the complex and multilayered social, medical, domestic and labor relationships that constituted wet nursing as a practice.