Incest and the American Family

Abstract

One in four sexual crimes reported annually in the U.S. involves incest, yet few historians of social movements, sexual violence, childhood, or the family have touched the topic. “Incest and the American Family” examines moments in U.S. history when women activists and state actors have worked together (although not always in unison) to solve the problem of incest in American homes. While historians have sometimes characterized incest as an “unspeakable” offense prior to second-wave feminists’ triumph in “giving voice” to the matter, my project shows that incest was a driving political issue at the heart of debates about freedom, justice, and the American family long before the genesis of modern feminism’s perspective on the subject. I connect the “discovery” of family violence in the 1870s to earlier critiques of patriarchal power made by Black and white women abolitionists, examine how judges and child protection activists wrestled with incest as a social issue through the mid-twentieth century, and trouble some of the conclusions other historians have drawn about the success of second-wave feminist organizing. My project contributes to historical analyses of the family by examining how patriarchal power and state power are produced and maintained in relationship to one another, untangling the ways incest compels the state to regulate families and restore legitimacy to patriarchal power as an organizing social, political, and economic principle underpinning U.S. governance. Integrating age, gender, race, class, and disability as categories of analysis, I argue incest victims have long served as the ground upon which America’s patriarchal family ideal has been contested, mapped, retrenched, and revised.