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History Professor Lynn Sacco meticulously documents centuries of denial, steeped in class, race, and gender, that refused to prosecute white fathers for incest. Rhode Island's Little Hostages The author provides a concise, one-paragraph summary of her new book that is hard to improve upon: 'For much of the nineteenth century, father-daughter incest was understood to take place among all classes and legal and extra-legal attempts to deal with it tended to be swift and severe. But public understanding changed markedly during the Progressive Era, when accusations of incest began to be directed exclusively towards immigrants, blacks, and the lower socioeconomic classes. Focusing on early twentieth-century reform movements and that era's epidemic of child gonorrhea, Lynn Sacco argues that middle-and-upper-class white males, too, molested female children in their households, even as official records of their acts declined dramatically.' History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive 2009 Lynn Sacco's absorbing and nuanced book investigates the empirical reality of father-daughter incest by drawing together historical evidence from disparate sources... In an inspired move, she steps aside from the confusions and controversies of today to investigate medical, legal, and newspaper reports from the past two centuries to discover whether communities were ever aware that sex crimes were being committed within their own borders and if so, what they did about it. Women's Review of Books 2010 Historian Sacco grounds her history of incest, particularly parent-and-child incest, in a broad discussion of mores, an analysis of gonorrhea in children, and awareness of the underlying codes of racism and classism that dominated dialogue in the US... This study of sexual assault and its interpretations, with incest as only a part of that picture, should be useful for collections on family violence. Choice 2010 This engaging and accessible book weaves together narratives of social, professional and technological change. Sacco particularly excels when considering the processes by which incest shifted between political spheres, describing the transition from religion to medicine and eventually to public health. Social History of Medicine 2010 This is a path-breaking and important work in medical history. -- Joan Sangster Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2010 Sacco chronicles an appalling history of influential individual professionals and organizations whose devotion to eliminating STDs stopped short of accusing middle-class white fathers of assaulting their daughters... She has proven this indictment with meticulous research, all of it offered to the reader with clarity and-given the nature of this inquiry-admirable dispassion... Sacco's monograph is the most extensive investigation devoted to the leadership that health professionals gave the public on this issue... impressive. -- Louise Barnett American Historical Review 2011

A deeply insightful contribution to the fields of the history of sexuality, the history of science, family history, and the history of childhood. Sacco shows meticulously, convincingly, and often movingly how the needs of society invade rational thought and impede scientific progress, and how treatments of certain diseases are mediated by the weight of moral sanction. - Rachel Devlin, author of Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture

Author Information

Lynn Sacco is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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