Mothers’ and Fathers’ Experience of Weaning a Baby: From a Forced Weaning to a Chosen Weaning at the Turn of the Century in France
Pages 101 to 126
Cite this article
- ROLLET, Catherine,
- Rollet, Catherine.
- Rollet, C.
https://doi.org/10.3917/dev.152.0101
Cite this article
- Rollet, C.
- Rollet, Catherine.
- ROLLET, Catherine,
https://doi.org/10.3917/dev.152.0101
Whilst weaning is a key moment for many agents—physicians, manufacturers, public health administration—, it is also a stage full of emotion and caution for families, as we can learn not just from letters and personal diaries, but also from medical texts. This is because weaning signals the end of a very specific period of infant care. The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was a crucial period that saw the crystallization of conflicts, but also of concurrences between the desires of mothers, fathers and families, and medical advice, market proposals, and health preoccupations. Here, we will explore the experiences that fathers and mothers had of different patterns of weaning in the period around the 1900s.
Keywords
- weaning a baby at the end of the XIXth century
- private diaries
- parent-infant relationships, France
Publisher keywords: France, parent-infant relationships, private diaries, weaning a baby at the end of the XIX<exposant traitementparticulier="non">th</exposant> century