The marriage of female foundlings in nineteenth-century Italy

In: Continuity and change: a journal of social structure, law and demography in past societies, Band 13, Heft 2, S. 201-220

Abstract

The large-scale abandonment of infants in the European past has
attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Its staggering
dimensions in many countries of Europe, as recently as the nineteenth
century, have prompted some uncomfortable rethinking about family life
and parent–child (and especially mother–child) relations in
the past.
Studies of abandonment have contributed to our understanding not only
of gender ideology and gender relations, but also of the roles played by
state and Church in regulating sexuality and family life.Yet research on abandoned children to date has had a limited focus.
The great bulk of the literature looks at the process of abandonment itself,
the terrifyingly high mortality of the foundlings in infancy, and the
process by which foundling homes placed their wards in rural foster
homes. Perhaps because of the notoriously high mortality of the
abandoned babies – though also no doubt due to the greater difficulty
of
generating suitable data from the archives – little attention has
been paid
to those foundlings who survived childhood. Typical is the admission
found in the major study of foundling homes in Portugal: 'The fate
of the
few foundlings who reached adulthood is unknown.'Yet through the nineteenth century – which provides our focus
here –
large numbers of foundlings did reach adulthood, and a variety of public
authorities were very much concerned about just what kinds of adults they
became. Even in determining the placement of infants with wetnurses,
foundling home authorities considered the long-term implications for
their future as adults. The widespread aversion to placing abandoned
infants with wetnurses in the cities was linked to both a belief that the
city
was corrupt and was likely to produce less wholesome adults than a rural
upbringing and to a concern that concentrating a large number of
propertyless, family-less foundlings in the city might well create an adult
population that would pose a threat to public order.