Nineteenth-century women from the Beemsterpolder did not or hardly breastfeed their children, according to new bone research. Possibly these mothers were – ironically – too busy producing dairy.

Imagine a nineteenth-century farming village in North Holland. Would you then expect that babies and toddlers were all breastfed there? Probably. However, this appears not to have been the case in the Beemster polder, so they stated biological anthropologist Andrea Waters (University of Western Ontario in Canada) and colleagues. From the bones of 277 Beemsteraren turns out that many children have had little or no breast-feeding.

“That really surprised me!” says Waters. “Because the Beemster was a rural community and most women worked close to home, I thought the breastfeeding period would last much longer.”

Nitrogen and Carbon

The research was done with bones that were excavated from the Middenbeemster cemetery in 2011, when the Keyserkerk was expanded, says Waters. “Then the skeletons were transferred to Leiden University for research.”

Those bones can then tell you what the deceased mainly ate and drank in the months or years before his death. This research concerned forms of nitrogen and carbon that are slightly heavier than the most common variants. “A child who is breastfed has more of it than a child who is formula-fed, such as cow’s milk or porridge.”

Too busy

As a result, breastfeeding was anything but the norm in nineteenth-century Middenbeemster. Which, given the circumstances, seems odd. Formula feeding was more common in Catholic than Protestant areas, Waters and colleagues write. And in cities where poorer women worked outside the home and could not feed their children all day long.

So why did the women of Middenbeemster rarely breastfeed their children? Waters and colleagues speculate that they were simply too busy for that. “The average workday lasted 12 to 16 hours, with a two-hour break for the main meal of the day,” the researchers write. “On Sundays they worked half a day.”

In addition, the women not only looked after the household and the children, but were also in charge of milking the cows and processing the milk. In other words, they were too busy producing dairy to, well, produce dairy themselves. In addition, there was of course enough cow’s milk available to feed the children.

From bones to teeth

An important point is that bones change continuously throughout life. As a result, you cannot determine from a skeleton of an adult whether the person in question has been breastfed or formula fed. So you are dependent on the bones of children. “It is easy to imagine that there could be a difference between how babies and children who died young were fed, and babies and children who did survive childhood. Perhaps the latter were breastfed for longer.”

That is why Waters is now also investigating the teeth of the Beemsternaren. “Once tooth structure is formed, it no longer changes. As a result, even with a tooth of a 50-year-old you can still see how he or she was fed as a baby.”

Arable farming instead of livestock

Furthermore, Waters will attack other villages. “I think it’s important to analyze more communities from the nineteenth century, to see how breastfeeding habits varied. It is then certainly interesting to look at other rural villages – for example, who practiced arable farming instead of livestock, or were Catholic.”