Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital

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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.

Reviews

This is a fascinating and exhaustive study of unmarried mothers who applied to the London Foundling Hospital in the Victorian period. Sheetz-Nguyen has mined applications for admission in order to draw a detailed picture of the calculus of respectability employed by members of the Foundling Hospitals Board of Governors and Committee to assess petitioners claims ... Sheetz-Nguyen combines comprehensive quantitative analysis of these issues with qualitative evidence drawn from the rich biographies of individual petitioners assembled from the petition packets. -- Samantha Williams, University of Cambridge, UK * Family & Community History (Vol. 16.2) *
Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital offers a fascinating consideration of the interaction of desperate female petitioners and the elite men who decided their fates. The framework used to analyse these decisions, a calculus of respectability, is a useful tool for explaining the variety of factors that entered into the Foundling Hospitals decisions. We can learn a great deal from narratives derived from the archive of this institution and presented here. -- Andrew August, Penn State University * Journal of Victorian Culture *
Jessica Sheetz-Nguyens examination of perhaps the most well-known of these institutions is a welcome addition to a growing body of work on unwed mothers . . . Sheetz-Nguyen offers a worthwhile analysis of mothers petitions to the Foundling Hospital which provides insights into societys somewhat ambivalent attitudes towards unwed maternity, and the reformability of youth, working-class courtship and sexual practices, and the employability and character of female domestic servants. -- Joanne Bailey, Oxford Brookes University * Social History *

Author Bio

Jessica Sheetz-Nguyen is Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma, US. She teaches Women's History from a European and international perspective.