Join BCA to celebrate Burlington artist and author Barbara Zucker's new book, The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled published by Abbeville Press.  

Zucker will lead a participatory conversation about art making, book publishing, process, and the fascinating profession of the wet nurse. You may have stories about the wet nurse yourself, if so, please bring them to share. Milk and cookies will be served.  

The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled is both a social history and a feminist act of reparation, uncovering the forgotten—perhaps deliberately buried—occupation of wet nursing. The wet nurse—a woman hired to breastfeed a child not her own—is an age-old occupation; in fact, archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen’s wet nurse. In modern Europe and the United States, wet nursing persisted into the early twentieth century, when bottles and formula rendered it virtually obsolete. This labor was inherently layered with issues of misogyny, race, and class, as mothers who had recently given birth ceased nourishing their own baby to provide for their entire family. Spanning social strata, wealthy families hired wet nurses to spare mothers the necessity of nursing, while foundling babies were fed by wet nurses employed by orphanages. Zucker’s lively text is abundantly illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs she has collected over years of research, as well as her own arresting drawings and sculptures inspired by the topic. The Second Oldest Profession is essential and provocative reading for anyone interested in women’s history. 

Barbara Zucker (b. 1940) is an artist, writer and professor working in sculpture, drawing and installation. Playing with post-minimalism, her earliest “chair sculptures” of the 1960’s challenged the dominate art dictates of the time, as did later works from the 1970’s and 1980’s that are most closely associated with the Pattern and Decoration Movement. Her elegant and often minimal forms frequently utilize industrial materials and employ visual humor to reference the politics around women’s bodies.  

Zucker’s work has been exhibited in museums across the US and is included in numerous collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Broad Art Museum, among others. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Ms. Magazine to name a few. Zucker has also written for Art News, Hyperallergic, The Village Voice, The Art Journal, M/E/A/N/I/N/G and Heresies. In 1972 Zucker was one of the first two founders of A.I.R. Gallery.