День: 05.10.2015

Birth Families and Adoptive Mothers

Several women in this study undertook a bold and risky venture to include contact with the birth mother as part of an expanding kinship system that is not reflected on birth certificates or through other legal documents. Wflien the adop­tive family incorporates birth parents who have given up their legal rights to their biological offspring, […]

CHASTITY AND CLASS

We have seen how far, and with what success, sexual charities tried to reaffirm traditional Christian principles of personal responsibility for sin and redemption. The public philanthropy of the later eighteenth century also helped to develop new ideas. In particular, it undermined the idea that all acts of unchastity were inherently and equally culp­able, and […]

INSIDE THE ASYLUM

Few traces have survived of life in these places before the nineteenth century. Their buildings have long vanished. All the manuscripts of the London Magdalen House have been destroyed. A single ledger is all that survives from the Lambeth Asylum. Our only way in is through the admissions books of the third main charity, the […]

SELF-INTEREST AND SEXUAL INTEREST

The appeal of the philanthropic approach went far beyond its prom­ise of social improvement. Vanity, fashion, and self-interest were also important motives. Networks of family, friendship, and business, for example, were crucial to the success of every public charity. Between them, the eight men who founded the Magdalen held five director­ships of the Russia Company, […]

Ethnicity, Aging, and Mental Health

As you saw first in Chapter 1 and elsewhere in the text, sociocultural influences are a major and often overlooked factor in understanding people’s behavior and developmental history. Mental health is no exception; in fact, sociocultural influences must be considered in assessing people’s behavior to understand its meaning more adequately and in designing effective ways […]

OF BEETLES AND DANDIES

Junger believed ‘the values of the bourgeois world’ to be incom­patible with what he called ‘the select embodiments of a powerful masculinity’ and on one occasion he even went so far as to depict combat as ‘the male form of procreation’ (quoted in Huyssen 1993: 10). But by no means every writer who has found […]