By the Renaissance, the wet nurse as status symbol had begun to trickle down to the merchant classes. Those slave children who did survive were allowed virtually no connection with their mothers, and weaning was forced early so that slave women could conceive additional slave children (often upwards of fifteen in a lifetime) for their master. On the plantations, black slave women were stripped of all reproductive rights and exploited to suckle the children of their white masters. Next to prostitution, wet-nursing (being hired to breastfeed another woman's child) is perhaps one of the world's oldest professions for women; nearly every advanced civilization employed some version of it. In fact, Mammy -- the house slave character in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind -- wasn't just the servant who raised Scarlett O'Hara; Mammy had been Scarlett's wet nurse.

Source: Huffington Post June 30, 2016 18:10 UTC