Nurses, Foster Mothers, Businesswomen, and Baby‐Farmers: Market‐Based Infant Care in Pre‐WWI Australia

In 19th‐century Australia, there were few childcare options for mothers who needed to work. Residential institutions emerged as the colonial society’s preferred mode of placing older children, but they did not accommodate those below the age of two or three years. Thus, a private foster care market comprised of women prepared to take payment for nursing infants came to provide an essential service. Although the existence of this foster‐mother workforce was widely known, it did not attract significant public debate until the latter decades of the century. This article uses historical newspapers and the records of the government’s child welfare department in the Australian Colony of Victoria to trace the discourses invoked in debates about paid motherhood with a particular focus on the period from 1850 to 1915. It argues that by the time public alarm about private arrangements peaked in the 1890s, paid infant placements that were entirely unregulated by the state were almost non‐existent, and that by the end of this period, the government and private systems were effectively working as one. Nevertheless, moral panics about so‐called baby‐farming and infanticide helped entrench an association in social discourse between “mothering” for payment and infant exploitation, and by the early 20th century there was a general suspicion about the motives of people who wanted to be remunerated for their work and expenses as foster parents—a suspicion which lingers in the 21st century.