Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control [Paperback]

David I. Kertzer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0807056057 | ISBN-13: 978-0807056059 | Publication Date: August 30, 1994

Sacrificed for Honor reveals a shocking and little-known system for the surveillance and control of unmarried mothers and their children that operated in Catholic Europe for nearly three centuries, ending just a century ago.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pregnant single women in 19th-century Italy, threatened with the loss of their own and their families' honor, gave their babies to foundling homes, where hundreds of thousands of children died from starvation and disease. In this shocking and engrossing study, Kertzer, a historian and anthropologist at Brown, blames the Catholic Church for its central role in nurturing a system that controlled women's sexuality, exempted men from parental responsibility and consigned infants to death. Midwives were recruited by church and state officials to inform on illicit pregnancies. Many foundling homes devised programs under which unwed mothers, in order to pay for their own infants' care, were forced to serve as wet nurses for other children. Kertzer draws loose parallels between the system of legalized infant abandonment, which spread throughout southern Europe, and contemporary debates on abortion and the role of church and state in defining the social good.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

David I. Kertzer is the author of, among other books, Prisoner of the Vatican, The Popes Against the Jews, and The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is provost of Brown University and professor of anthropology and Italian studies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (August 30, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807056057
• ISBN-13: 978-0807056059
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #345,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars David Kertzer's Sacrificed for Honor, September 13, 2000

By 

Laura Mccloskey "psychprofessor" (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control (Paperback)

This book is a highly accessible, but well-documented and fascinating historical account of how a society adapted to the growth in out of wedlock births (early 19th c). Professor Kertzer describes the collusion of Church and State in Italy to enforce women who have children out of wedlock into indentured labor as wetnurses, and describes how foundling homes proliferated and to what sociopolitical ends. This is a feminist analysis of the tragic nexus of women, Church and State in 19th century Italy. This book was featured in a graduate course I taught and the graduate students enthusiastically endorsed it - as do I. It is elegantly written and presents a well-documented analysis of how women and their offspring were used and mistreated during this period in Italian history.