Book Review: Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History

Book Review: Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History

Lynn Sacco, author of Unspeakable, was an attorney before embarking on a second career as an historian. Law, like history, is a profession based on the pursuit of evidence and the ability to craft recalcitrant fragments of fact into persuasive explanatory narratives. Yet Unspeakableaddresses a subject that has left an extremely ambiguous and elusive textual record, and its argument turns around the fact of that elusiveness. Through prodigious research in two hundred years of court records, medical journals, and newspapers, Sacco establishes that father-daughter incest was once widely acknowledged and prosecuted yet disappeared from American public discourse in the early twentieth century. How, she asks, did father-daughter incest become unspeakable?

Sociology and Political Science, History