Reproductive Unfreedom and Structural Violence in Early Modern Catholic Europe
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article argues that reproductive unfreedom was a form of structural violence that significantly constrained poor women’s and children’s lives across early modern Catholic Europe. Reproductive freedom entails parents’ ability to raise their own children safely and sustainably. This was impossible for the thousands of poor women who were forced to delegate their mothering by abandoning children to foundling hospitals, where mortality rates were extraordinarily high through much of the period. How did these hundreds of thousands of infant lives become “ungrievable”? This article takes apart the social logic of reproductive unfreedom, and it investigates how structural violence implicated not only institutions but also the intimate dynamics between women and the children in their care. It pays particular attention to the multiple ways that care work was coerced, and how women refused to undertake this care, which often meant that infants became collateral damage of labor disputes. The article thus contributes to scholarship on early modern social and gender history by reframing the history of delegated mothering as a history of structural violence perpetrated on poor women and children, and perpetrated in turn by poor women themselves.
Source: The Journal of Modern History
DOI: 10.1086/738055
Author: Erin Maglaque
Institution: Durham University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4417001990