Of Milk and Homeland:

Breastfeeding, Immigrant Mothers, and Eugenics at Castle Garden

Deborah J. Wilk

The immigrant mother was a repeated figure type in nineteenth-century American pictures in the popular press of immigration. Her frequent appearance can be seen as a logical response to the influx of immigrants in America, as well as part of an increased pictorial focus in the nineteenth century on women and motherhood in general. Yet the immigrant mother type is also part of broader concerns in American culture related to issues of ethnicity and nationalism.

Within the corpus of immigrant mother pictures there is one representation that was frequently repeated and has never received any scholarly attention: the immigrant woman breastfeeding an infant. Curiously, the breastfeeding immigrant mother was a stock character in crowded pictures of Castle Garden, the immigration station that preceded Ellis Island in New York City. Through the examination of paintings and of illustrations from such publications as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper this paper will consider the ways the image of the lactating immigrant woman participated in the construction of ideas related to ethnicity, citizenship, and eugenics. Breast-milk, like blood, was believed to be a medium for hereditary transmission and it was thought that a woman’s behavior as well as her moral character could be passed through the milk. As women were considered creators of the citizenry, representations of breastfeeding immigrant women took on political significance as it participated in the contemporary discourse on race and nation.