Gender Ideology and Infant Abandonment in Nineteenth-Century Italy

Abstract

Gender Ideology and Infant Abandonment in Nineteenth-Century Italy Few images of Italian women are more vivid than the devoted mamma, zealously protecting her children. That image is still invoked in Italy today when people lament the decline in family values. Yet it cannot withstand historical scrutiny, as an examination of the massive dimensions of infant abandonment in Italy's past makes clear. Just over a century ago, more than 33,000 Italian newborns were being abandoned every year at foundling homes which were so overrun by unwanted children that they scarcely knew what to do with them. For part of this period, over one third of all babies born in the cities of Milan and Florence were left at foundling homes. Nor was Italy exceptional in this regard, for similar mass abandonment of newborns occurred in France, Russia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere in the nineteenth century.1 Boswell's The Kindness of Strangers has directed attention to the staggering dimensions of infant abandonment in European history.2 Yet his book deals primarily with the centuries before institutionalized means were established in western Europe to deal with abandonment. Foundling homes were built in a number of Italian cities in the fifteenth century, and this system then spread to many other European countries. Abandonment of infants