Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital - Hardcover

Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1441110925 ISBN 13: 9781441110923

Publisher: Continuum, 2012

Synopsis

This volume seeks to address the questions of poverty, charity, and public welfare, taking the nineteenth-century London Foundling Hospital as its focus. It delineates the social rules that constructed the gendered world of the Victorian age, and uses 'respectability' as a factor for analysis: the women who successfully petitioned the Foundling Hospital for admission of their infants were not East End prostitutes, but rather unmarried women, often domestic servants, determined to maintain social respectability. The administrators of the Foundling Hospital reviewed over two hundred petitions annually; deliberated on about one hundred cases; and accepted not more than 25 per cent of all cases. Using primary material from the Foundling Hospital's extensive archives, this study moves methodically from the broad social and geographical context of London and the Foundling Hospital itself, to the micro-historical case data of individual mothers and infants.

About this title

Product Description:

Rare Book

About the Author:

Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen is Director of the History Education Program at the University of Central Oklahoma, USA.

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1441110925
• ISBN 13: 9781441110923
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256