Gender, Race, and Class in the Making of a Capitalist Labor Market. The Wet Nurses of Montevideo (1852-1890)

The article analyses the work of wet nurses in Montevideo between 1852 and 1890. Using various sources (job adver-tisements in newspapers, asylum documentation, medical handbooks, and documents from the municipal authorities), it stud-ies the insertion of wet nurses into the private sphere of families and their role as workers in the city's foundling and an orphan asylum. It shows the presence of blackwomen working as wet nurses in the immediate post-abolition period and the increasing participation of Europeans in the decades after 1860. The precarious workthey performed was essential for the subsistence of their families and formed part of one of the few employment alternatives available to poor women (and mothers) in the city.