“There was no such thing as reproductive freedom for poor women in early modern Catholic Europe.” A new article in the Journal of Modern History examines several facets of “reproductive unfreedom” in the early modern period: namely, single motherhood, foundling hospitals, and wet nursing. In particular, “ Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe ” investigates how these formations of “delegated mothering” were disproportionately experienced by poor women and resulted in drastically higher infant mortality rates. Ultimately, author Erin Maglaque argues, the history of delegated mothering is one of structural violence against poor women and their children.
In early modern Europe, especially following the Council of Trent and its solidification of Catholic doctrine, single motherhood was intensely stigmatized. And although single or poor mothers were thus incentivized to ensure that an illegitimate child was “unlikely to live to its first birthday,” author Erin Maglaque writes, institutions emerged to present an alternative to infanticide.
One of these was the foundling hospital. Established so that single mothers could anonymously abandon their infants on its doorstep, the foundling hospital nevertheless offered little sanctuary for the children it took on. At one hospital in Florence, mortality rates for foundling children reached as high in some years as 915 per thousand. Some historians have debated if the existence of the foundling hospital in fact encouraged infant abandonment and subsequent death, as a way of culling an unwanted population; regardless of good or ill intent, writes Maglaque, the result of this negligence was one of structural violence and death.
Other impoverished mothers turned over their children to wet nurses to look after while they worked, or they became wet nurses themselves in order to earn income. Wealthy families could afford a private wet nurse, but many wet nurses working in less protected circumstances were responsible for multiple children while also engaged in other labor.
Due to these “circumstances of scarcity,” Maglaque writes, infant death was common in wet nursing arrangements. In addition to being overworked, some wet nurses didn’t have enough milk for multiple infants, even while they were forced to take on their care in order to make ends meet. Additionally, some of them committed fraud, allowing the babies charged to them to perish while still collecting wages for their work, demonstrating, writes Maglaque, “how reproductive unfreedom was perpetuated not only by institutions but also by the women who were themselves both victims and agents of violence."
Contrasting these systems of punition, Maglaque highlights programs of family support in some areas of Catholic Europe that led to reductions in infant mortality rates. When religious or municipal organizations established funds to support new mothers, writes Maglaque, infant deaths saw steep drop-offs—and yet, almost all of these programs supported legitimate children or children with two parents, not the illegitimate children of single mothers. As such, these initiatives created a hierarchy of care, further cementing single mothers and their offspring as “the collateral damage acceptable to a society that systematically deprived women of the ability to raise their children in safe and sustainable ways.”
Such a framing, Maglaque concludes, still resonates today. Despite living in a contemporary society characterized by many instances of reproductive injustice, Maglaque writes, feminism within the academy has become co-opted and diluted, rendering it less capable of responding adequately to the crises we face. “It is worth trying to understand how the structural violence of reproductive unfreedom worked in early modern Catholic society,” Maglaque concludes—“if only as a dark and imperfect mirror held up to our own freedom.”
The Journal of Modern History is recognized as the leading journal worldwide for the study of all varieties of European history. The journal’s broad geographical and temporal scope—the history of Europe since the Renaissance—makes it unique: JMH explores not only events and movements in single countries but also broader questions that span particular times and places.
The Journal of Modern History
Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe