Women Abandoning Children

Introduction

Abandoning a child was a greater, and usually more final, family separation. Hundreds of thousands of children were abandoned each year at institutions. At the height of child abandonment around mid century, approximately 17,000 children per year were abandoned in Moscow; in St.Pietersburg about 9,000.

Discussion

Children posed problems for poor families when they could not, or would not, work either at home or outside for wages, thus failing to contribute to their own support and the family economy. Some families intended the placement of a child in a workhouse or orphanage as a temporary measure - a means to hold the rest of the family together in hard times. Families in Italy could place their children in reformatories if they misbehaved; critics charged that families often wanted to shed the financial burden of their children and have the state support them, and those children were not really out of control.

Abandoning an infant was part of a desperate woman's culture of expediencies whether married or not. Most of the women who abandoned their babies were not married. However, illegitimacy alone does not suffice as an explanation for child abandonment. Extreme poverty and lack of other alternatives was one of the most likely reasons for infant abandonment. In Paris, Madrid and Milan, child abandonment was an expedient response to high prices of grain and bread. Milan had the highest proportion of married women abandoning their babies. Evidence indicates that families used the foundling home in Milan as a temporary shelter during times of economic crisis for infants they could not afford to keep, and for whom there were no kin or neighbors to help. In Moscow around mid century about half the abandoned children belonged to married women. Parents used foundling homes in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Milan as a welfare system during a climate of calamities, even though the possibility of the child's death after abandonment was high. French authorities made it extremely difficult for mothers to reclaim their abandoned babies. As a result, far fewer married couples used the foundling home. Portugal, like Milan and unlike France, made it relatively easy for a mother to reclaim her child. But in Portugal, unlike France, many mothers admitted being married, and some had other small children. They also mentioned that their husbands were away, or in prison, and they were too poor to care for all their children. Women unable to breastfeed and carry on their normal waged work sent infants out to a wet nurse via abandonment. It was unlikely, however, that the babies lived long enough to go back to their mothers - if their mothers actually came to reclaim them (Abbots , pp. 145-150).

Mothers may also have been driven to abandon their babies because of their working conditions as well as their impoverishment. Most single mothers could not work and care for a baby themselves. In Paris, at least a third of the single women who abandoned their babies were unmarried domestic servants who could not keep ...