パリにおける「住み込み乳母」(1865-1914)  [in Japanese] The live-in Nurses in Paris (1865-1914)  [in Japanese]

19世紀後半、フランスでは乳母制度と発展し「乳母産業」と称されるほどであった。なかでもパリのブルジョワ女性たちは、社交生活のために、自ら母乳を与えることはせず、自宅に住み込ませた乳母に子育てを委託していた。このような乳母は「住み込み乳母」と呼ばれ、19世紀最後の10年間に急激に増加した。「住み込み乳母」はブルジョワジーの階層誇示の象徴としての役目を担わされ、人目につく仰々しい衣装を着て、毎日公園や街頭に現れた。すなわち「住み込み乳母」の増加は、労働者層との差異化を計ろうとするブルジョワたちの見栄の産物であり、社会改良家やモラリストの非難の的となった。彼らは、「住み込み乳母」の利用は乳母の子どもたちを母親から引き離し、悲惨な状況に追いやることになっていることを暴き出し、この「住み込み乳母」の子どもの問題を乳児死亡率の高さに結びつける。すなわち「住み込み乳母」が、当時のフランスの特徴と考えられた、人口減少、兵士要員の不足、さらには国家の危機の元凶であるとされたのである。しかし20世紀に入ると、あまりにも普及しすぎた「住み込み乳母」は、ブルジョワジーの階層誇示の象徴としての役割を失い、その典型的な衣装は消滅する。批判を受け、「住み込み乳母」の弊害に気づかされたブルジョワ女性たちは、乳母の子どもの問題を解決するため、保育施設への援助を行った。また殺菌技術の発達により危険性の薄らいできたほ乳瓶を利用する召使の女性を雇うようになっていく。「住み込み乳母」に変わってブルジョワジーの象徴として現れてくるのが、自ら母乳を与え子育てをする母親像である。ただ、現実には赤ん坊の世話をする召使の女性はまだ必要であり、彼女たちは乳母、あるいは子守と言う呼び名で存続しつづけた。

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, France was witness to a repid growth in the wet-nursing system. The system became so popular as to be widely known as the so-called Wet-nursing Industry (l'industrie des nourrices). Bourgeois women in Paris were particularly dependent on wet nurses: they didn't breast-feed their own babies, but were busy with social activities. They hired a wet nurse who lived with her master. Therefore, they were called the live-in nurses (la nourrice sur lieu) and repidly increased in number during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The live-in nurses appeared on streets and parks with pompous costumes, because they functioned as an ostentatious class symbol of the bourgeoisie. That is, the explosion of the live-in nurses was a result of the vanity of the bourgeoisie, who wanted to differentiate between themselves and the laboring class. Social reformers and moralists criticized the custom of hiring the live-in nurses. They claimed that the bourgeoisies' hiring the the live-in nurses pulled nurses' children apart from their own mothers and put them in a miserable situation. They associated the problems of the live-in nurses' children with a high infant mortality rate in France. They condemned the custom of hiring live-in nurses as a cause of depopulation, the shortage of soldires and crisis of the Nation, all of which were thought to be peculiar to France. However, since the beginning of the twentieth century, live-in nurses were popularized so widely that they lost the function of the class symbol and, hence, their typical pompous costumes disappeared. The bourgeois women, who were criticized and noticed the harmful effects on nurses' infants, started to assist nursery homes. In addition, they hired domestic servants as a substitution for the live-in nurses, who bottle-fed babies with improved artificial milk. Instead of the live-in nurses, an image of a mother who breast-feeds her own baby appeared as a class symbol of the bourgeoisie. However, in real life the bourgeois mothers still needed domestic servants who took care of their children. Although the domestic servants didn't breast feed, they were called nourrices or nurses.