342Chapter 18
provinces. As breast feeding normally lasted twelve to
eighteen months, only wealthy parents (who could hire
a live-in wet nurse) or the poorest might see their infant
children with any frequency. The great French novelist
Honoré de Balzac was born in 1799 and immediately
dispatched to a wet nurse; he bitterly remembered his
infancy as being “neglected by my family for three
years.”
Infant care by rural wet nurses was not universal. It
was most common in towns and cities, especially in so-
cial classes that could afford the service. The poor usu-
ally fed infants gruel—flour mixed in milk, or bread
crumbs in water—by dipping a finger into it and letting
the baby suck the finger. Upper-class families in En-
gland, France, and northern Italy chose wet-nursing;
fewer did so in Central Europe. Every king of France,
starting with Louis IX (Saint Louis), was nurtured by a
succession of royal nurses; but mothers in the Habsburg
royal family, including the empress Maria Theresa,
were expected to nurse their own children.
Separation from parents remained a feature of life
for young children after their weaning. Both Catholi-
cism, which perceived early childhood as an age of in-
nocence, and Protestantism, which held children to be
marked by original sin, advocated the separation of the
child from the corrupt world of adults. This meant the
segregation of children from many parental activities
as well as the segregation of boys and girls. Many ex-
treme cases existed among the aristocracy. The Mar-
quis de Lafayette, the hero of the American revolution,
lost his father in infancy; his mother left the infant at
the family’s provincial estate while she resided in Paris
and visited him during a brief vacation once a year.
Balzac went straight from his wet nurse to a Catholic
boarding school where the Oratorian Brothers allowed
him no vacations and his mother visited him twice in
six years.
Family structures were changing in early modern
times, but most children grew up in patriarchal families.
Modern parent-child relationships, with more emphasis
upon affection than upon discipline, were beginning to
appear. However, most children still lived with the
emotional detachment of both parents and the stern
discipline of a father whose authority had the sanction
of law. The Russian novelist Sergei Aksakov recalled
that, when his mother had rocked her infant daughter
to sleep in the 1780s, relatives rebuked her for showing
“such exaggerated love,” which they considered con-
trary to good parenting and “a crime against God.”
Children in many countries heard the words of Martin
Luther repeated: “I would rather have a dead son than a
disobedient one.”
Childhood had not yet become the distinct and
separate phase of life that it later became. In many
ways, children passed directly from a few years of in-
fancy into treatment as virtual adults. Middle- and
upper-class boys of the eighteenth century made a
direct transition from wearing the gowns and frocks of
infancy into wearing the pants and panoply (such as
swords) of adulthood. This rite of passage, when boys
went from the care of women to the care of men, nor-
mally happened at approximately age seven. European
traditions and laws varied, but in most economic, legal,
and religious ways, boys became adults between seven
and fourteen. Peasant children became members of the
household economy almost immediately, assuming
such duties as tending to chickens or hoeing the
kitchen garden. In the towns, a child seeking to learn a
craft and enter a guild might begin with an apprentice-
ship (with another family) as early as age seven. Chil-
dren of the elite were turned over to tutors or
governesses, or they were sent away to receive their
education at boarding schools. Children of all classes
began to become adults by law at age seven. In English
law seven was the adult age at which a child could be
flogged or executed; the Spanish Inquisition withheld
adult interrogation until age thirteen. Twelve was the
most common adult age at which children could con-
sent to marriage or to sexual relations.
Tradition and law treated girls differently from
boys. In the Roman law tradition, prevalent across
southern Europe and influential in most countries, girls
never became adults in the legal sense of obtaining
rights in their own name. Instead, a patriarchal social
order expected fathers to exercise the rights of their
daughters until they married; women’s legal rights then
passed to their husbands. Most legal systems contained
other double standards for young men and women. The
earliest age for sexual consent was typically younger for
a girl than for a boy, although standards of respectable
behavior were much stricter for young women than for
young men. Economic considerations also created dou-
ble standards: A family might send a daughter to the
convent, for example, instead of providing her with
a dowry.The Life Cycle: Marriage and the Family
Despite the early ages at which children entered the
adult world, marriage was normally postponed until
later in life. Royal or noble children might sometimes
be married in childhood for political or economic rea-
sons, but most of the population married at signifi-