Machine generated contents note: 6. Foundlings and Makeshift Coffins: Community Complicity and Dead Babies. 2. Peril Stories: Licit Intimacy, Space, and Community Safeguarding -- 3. Holding Men Responsible: Fertility, Community, and Court -- 4. "Remedies" and Remedies: Managing Out-of-Wedlock Pregnancy -- 5. Intimate Labor: Paid Work and an Intimate Economy of Reproduction -- 6. Foundlings and Makeshift Coffins: Community Complicity and Dead Babies.
Summary:
"Based on extensive archival research, the extraordinary stories of ordinary peoples' lives explore many facets of young people's intimacy from meeting to courtship and to the many occasions when untimely pregnancies necessitated a range of strategies that might include marriage but also efforts to induce abortions, arrangements for out of wedlock delivery and custody with the fathers or charging the babies to a foundling hospital or infanticide. Clergy, lawyers, social welfare officials, employers, midwives, wet-nurses, neighbors, family and friends supported young women and held young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. These practices of intimacy reframe our understanding of multiple aspects of the Old Regime. Their experiences challenge the centrality of the disciplining of female sexuality as a critical early modern project of state formation and religious reformation, the history of a sexual double standard in local and long contexts, the history of marriage, and the role of law in politics writ large and small of communities and institutions. Their lives also reshape many more specific debates, for instance, about the history of emotions, infanticide, attitudes to illegitimacy, pre-modern workplaces, and the body. It reveals the ways in which for working communities local management of intimacy with a heavy emphasis on pastoral care and pragmatic acceptance of the inevitability of out of wedlock pregnancy were the norm"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.