Abstract
The 1900 inquest revealed that efforts to reorganize foundling homes proceeded very erratically after 1865 because of the lack of central government direction and coordination. While some authorities began to alter the terms of public beneficence by forcibly involving unwed mothers in the care of infants, others stuck tenaciously to the old ruota regime of anonymous abandonment. The south as a whole failed to capture the momentum of change, with the result that it became a region marked by chronically high levels of child abandonment and stubbornly low levels of maternal reclamation. But in those northern and central regions where the pace of reform was quicker, medical practitioners in charge of foundling homes and maternity hospitals embraced the new creed of responsible unwed motherhood wholeheartedly. The system of arrangements for foundling relief which they introduced had a dramatic effect on single mothers.
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Notes
E. Mensi, ‘La questione dell’elevata mortalità degli illegittimi e sua pratica soluzione’, MI, 2 (June, 1927), pp. 69–73, 69.
A. Lo Monaco-Aprile, ‘Il valore etico dell’assistenza alle madri illegittime’, MI, 5 (November, 1930), pp. 1111–18, 1117.
F. Strina, ‘In tema di assistenza agli illegittimi’, MI, 3 (August, 1928), pp. 646–55, 650.
See E. Shorter, ‘Ilegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, II (Autumn, 1971), pp. 237–72. Shorter maintains that between 1750 and 1790 illegitimate fertility rates began to rise in Europe due to the start of a ‘sexual revolution’ in women’s attitudes (pp. 260–71). And some of the contributors to Bastardy and Its Comparative History, ed. P. Laslett, K. Oosterveen and R. M. Smith, (London, 1980) support this view and define the ‘illegitimacy-prone’ woman as a factory worker. To describe rising illegitimacy as a symptom of a ‘sexual revolution’ is problematical as the term can only appropriately be used to describe a process whereby women gained increased control over their lives, bodies, and fertility.
See L. Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory, pp. 174–9, for a discussion of the incidence of abortion and ‘miscarriages’ amongst urban working-class women.
For a comparison, see J. R. Gillis, ‘Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900’, Feminist Studies, V (1979), pp. 142–73. See also, R. G. Fuchs and L. P. Moch, ‘Pregnant, Single, and Far from Home: Migrant Women in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, American Historical Review, 95:4 (October, 1990), pp. 1007–31; these authors explore the connections between illegitimacy and ‘women’s poverty, geographic mobility, occupational instability, and absence of social protection’ (p. 1009).
A. Spallanzani, ‘I reati di infanticidio e di procurato aborto secondo le statistiche guidiziarie italiane’, in Comitato Italiano per lo Studio dei Problemi della Popolazione, Atti del Congresso Internazionale della Popolazione, Roma, 7–10 Settembre 1931, ed. C. Gini, vol. 7 (Rome, 1934), pp. 161–81, 177–8.
E. Menna, Le provvidenze del regime fascista per la battaglia demografico in Italia (Como, 1936), pp. 28–9.
On Mortara’s career, see L. Lenti, ‘La vita e le opere di Giorgio Mortara’, Giornale degli economisti, vol. xxvi (1967), pp. 199–218; Mortara was forced to flee Italy in 1938 because of the regime’s anti-semitic policy.
G. Mortara, ‘I concepimenti antenuziali’, Giornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica, 43:11 (August, 1911), pp. 107–209, 158, 202–3.
See G. A. Blanc’s ONMI (Milan, 1928), p. 7; this booklet also appeared as an extended article in Gerarchia.
G. D’Ormeo, ‘Brefotrofi’, MI, 1 (November, 1926), pp. 30–4, 30.
Ibid., p. 30.
See, for example, A. Carelli, ‘Sei anni di attività dell’opera nazionale maternità e infanzia’, MI, 7 (October, 1932), pp. 972–91, 973.
See G. Bock, ‘Antinatalism, Maternity and Paternity in National Socialist Racism’, in Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, ed. G. Bock and P. Thane (London and New York, 1991), pp. 233–55 on the compulsory sterilization of those categories of unmarried mothers, such as bastard-bearing recidivists, who were deemed to be biologically worthless to the race. S. Pedersen’s Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, 1993) does not say much about welfare provision for unmarried mothers in Britain and France. According to T. Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1992), p. 678, only a few American states permitted unmarried mothers to go on welfare during this period. Because they were poor, ‘deviant’, or institutionalized, some would have been vulnerable to compulsory sterilization on eugenic grounds.
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© 2002 Maria Sophia Quine
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Quine, M.S. (2002). The Illegitimacy Campaign under Fascism. In: Italy’s Social Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403919793_9
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