Review: Unspeakable: Father‐Daughter Incest in American History

Review: Unspeakable: Father‐Daughter Incest in American History

Complément du titre: By Lynn Sacco. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. 351 p.

For most of America's history, father‐daughter incest has been not just “unspeakable” but literally unthinkable. This lack of acknowledgment induced, as Lynn Sacco documents with overwhelming evidence, a willful blindness throughout society. The image of the father as the repository of rectitude had to be upheld at all costs, including the well‐being of girls, many of whom were little more than infants and were abused by the very people assumed to be their foremost protectors. What is breathtaking in a culture that has its own myth of the health care professional is the complicity of medically trained personnel of all sorts—including women—in perpetuating a false and unscientific view of a medical issue: how girls become infected with gonorrhea.

Archaeology, Museology, History