Releasing Mother's Burdens

In nineteenth-century Europe, the foundling hospital grew beyond its traditional purpose of mitigating the shame of unwed mothers by also permitting widows, widowers, and poor married couples to abandon their children there temporarily. In the Foundling Hospital of Madrid (fhm), this new short-term abandonment could be completely anonymous due to the implementation of a wheel-a device on the outside wall of the institution that could be turned to place a child inside-which remained open until 1929. The use of survival-analysis techniques to disentangle the determinants of retrieval in a discrete framework reveals important differences in the situations of the women who abandoned their children at the fhm, partly depending on whether they accessed it through the Maternity Hospital after giving birth or they accessed it directly. The evidence suggests that those who abandoned their children through the Maternity Hospital retrieved them only when they had attained a certain degree of economic stability, whereas those who abandoned otherwise did so just as soon as the immediate condition prompting the abandonment had improved

Abandonment (legal) · Geography · Political science · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law

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  Bárbara A Revuelta Eugercios, Bárbara A Revuelta-Eugercios•The History of the Family•2013

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• Assessing gender discrimination during infancy and childhood using twins

  Open Access•Francisco J Marco-Gracia, Francisco J Beltrán Tapia•The History of the Family•2022

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• Historia de la mortalidad infantil en la Casa de Huérfanos de Santiago (1898-1923)

  Open Access•Pablo Chávez Zúñiga, Jesús Soto•Anuario de Estudios Americanos•2019

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• Mortalidad infantil en Santiago

  Open Access•Pablo Chávez-Zúñiga, José Julián Soto-Lara•História Ciências Saúde-Manguinhos•2018

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• The Uses of Charity

  Peter Mandler•Uses of Charity•1990

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• Sacrificed for Honor

  Nicholas Terpstra•Sixteenth Century Journal•1994

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• The family strategies concept

  Theo Engelen, Jan Kok et al.•The History of the Family•2004

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• Because of Poverty brought into Hospital

  A Nuttall•Social History of Medicine•2007

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• Child abandonment in Portugal

  Open Access•Isabel Dos Guimarães Sá•Continuity and Change•1994

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• Discrete-Time Methods for the Analysis of Event Histories

  P D Allison•Sociological Methodology•1982

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• Poor Women and Children in the European Past

  Pamela Sharpe, J Henderson et al.•The Economic History Review•1995

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• Child Abandonment in European History

  Open Access•Louise A Tilly, Rachel G Fuchs et al.•Journal of Family History•1992

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• Children Abandoned and Taken Back

  Open Access•Guy Brunet•Journal of Family History•2011

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