Unspeakable
Subtitle: father-daughter incest in American history
By: Lynn Sacco.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 351
ISBN-13: 9780801893001
Subjects: Incest -- United States -- History; Child sexual abuse -- United States; Incest victims -- United States
Description: Overview: This history of father-daughter incest in the United States explains how cultural mores and political needs distorted attitudes toward and medical knowledge of patriarchal sexual abuse at a time when the nation was committed to the familial power of white fathers and the idealized white family. For much of the nineteenth century, father-daughter incest was understood to take place among all classes, and legal and extra-legal attempts to deal with it tended to be swift and severe. But public understanding changed markedly during the Progressive Era, when accusations of incest began to be directed exclusively toward immigrants, blacks, and the lower socioeconomic classes. Focusing on early twentieth-century reform movements and that era's epidemic of child gonorrhea, Lynn Sacco argues that middle- and upper-class white males, too, molested female children in their households, even as official records of their acts declined dramatically. Sacco draws on a wealth of sources, including professional journals, medical and court records, and private and public accounts, to explain how racial politics and professional self-interest among doctors, social workers, and professionals in allied fields drove claims and evidence of incest among middle- and upper-class white families into the shadows. The new feminism of the 1970s, she finds, brought allegations of father-daughter incest back into the light, creating new societal tensions.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Incest in the nineteenth century; title: Medicine and the law weigh in; title: Gonorrhea and incest break out; title: Protecting fathers, blaming mothers; title: Incest disappears from view; title: Incest in the twentieth century.