Sacrificed for Honor: Italian Infant Abandonment and the Politics of Reproductive Control

This book is a highly accessible, but well-documented and fascinating historical account of how a society adapted to the growth in out of wedlock births (early 19th c). Professor Kertzer describes the collusion of Church and State in Italy to enforce women who have children out of wedlock into indentured labor as wetnurses, and describes how foundling homes proliferated and to what sociopolitical ends. This is a feminist analysis of the tragic nexus of women, Church and State in 19th century Italy. This book was featured in a graduate course I taught and the graduate students enthusiastically endorsed it - as do I. It is elegantly written and presents a well-documented analysis of how women and their offspring were used and mistreated during this period in Italian history.