when mothers deign to nurse their own children
Rousseau's outspoken support for breastfeeding helped to revive the practice among middle and upper class European women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (See OC p. 1308, n.1.)
The theme of women being responsible for family harmony and for social morality more generally reappears in Rousseau's Julie or the New Eloise and his Letter to d'Alembert on the Theater .