The decline of wet nursing in the late nineteenth century reflected advances in artificial feeding, shifting cultural beliefs regarding motherhood, and new employment opportunities for women previously hired as wet nurses. Artificial feeding became the first choice of many middle-class women, as Rima Apple has explained, not only because it was easier, safer, and cheaper than wet nursing but also because it was promoted and used in the context of the maternal ideology known as scientific motherhood.

As America industrialized, child rearing became a home industry for middle-class women. Even as the percentage of single women who participated in the labor force soared and the number of women professionals expanded in occupations such as teaching and nursing, motherhood continued to be judged women's most vital career. The cultural significance of motherhood gained strength from women's collective action. Female reform organizations stressed improving society to make a better world for children – an ideology that historians would call “domestic feminism.” The Women's Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1873 and one of the most visible and successful women's organizations of the nineteenth century, used the slogan “home protection” in its battle against the evils of alcohol. Other women's groups sailed in the same direction: making better children and better homes their collective destination. Among the largest organizations with this goal were the General Federation of Women's Clubs, an umbrella group organized in 1890, whose numerous constituent members engaged in programs of domestic welfare, and the National Congress of Mothers, which was founded in 1897 to support the education of mothers and to expand the relationship between the child and the state.