feeding is, legally, a responsibility a woman owed to her husband (rather than
to her child). This legal construction is indeed telling, since breast-feeding
could well have been constructed as an obligation of mothers to their children,
just as education, according to Jewish law, is an obligation that fathers owe their
sons. This ancient formulation, which remained integral to medieval Jewish
society, prescribes a Jewish family in which men, as the heads of their house-
holds and of the community, were those who determined the orders of nursing.
The obligation to breast-feed, as well as the benefits that women who nursed
were entitled to, were part of the marriage agreement. A defined period of nurs-
ing, twenty-four months, was the legal time period discussed in the sources,
and a nursing mother was assigned unique legal status as a meniqa. Due to her
special circumstances, a mother nursing a child under twenty-four months of
age was exempt from fasting on fast days, and special laws of purity and impu-
rity related to menstruation applied to her.^24 In addition, as nursing was part
of the matrimonial agreement, and out of concern with the welfare of infants,
a nursing mother who was widowed was not allowed to remarry until the baby
was over twenty-four months of age:
“A nursing mother whose husband died—she should not be betrothed nor should
she wed until twenty-four months have been completed,” the words of R. Meir.
And R. Judah says: “Eighteen months.” And R. Jonathan b. Joseph says: “The
House of Shammai says twenty-four months and the House of Hillel says eighteen
months.” Said R. Simeon b. Gamliel: “In accord with the opinion of the one who
says twenty-four months, she is permitted to be wed in twenty-one months. In ac-
cord with the opinion of the one who says eighteen months, she may be wed in
fifteen months, for the milk deteriorates only after three months of conception.”^25These categories are repeated in the Talmud, and the House of Shammai’s
opinion became the accepted one.
The Talmud also discusses cases in which the child was given to a wet nurse,
or was weaned or died before age two and his/her widowed mother wished to
remarry. According to the Babylonian Talmud, if the child died, the mother
could remarry. If, however, a mother had weaned her child after nursing him/
her herself, or had hired a wet nurse after nursing for a while, she still could
not remarry before the end of the allotted period.^26 One of the explanations
for this law, an explanation offered by the Palestinian Talmud and suggested
and rejected in the Babylonian Talmud, is that the widowed mother who
wishes to remarry is suspect of having caused the death of her own child in
order to improve her value in the marriage market.^27
Most discussions concerning remarriage and nursing mothers in the Mishna
and Talmud distinguished between widows and divorcées. Since breast-
feeding was an obligation women owed their husbands, it was not the duty of
divorcées to nurse their children. Divorced women were to be paid by their ex-
husbands for nursing their children, but if they chose not to nurse, they had no