Fruits of Chastity and Lasciviousness: the Abandoned Children in Recife (1789-1832)

Abstract

This work investigates the abandonment of children born from chaste and lascivious, blessed and doubtful, relationships in Recife between 1789 and 1832. As live evidence of the moral “weakness” or as a “fruit of misery”, they were abandoned to bad weather conditions and carnivorous animals, left at houses’ and churches’ doors, on the streets and alleys, until the House of the Bare was finally created, mainly to shelter and rear them, to protect the honor of the well-born women and to discourage the infanticide. Paradoxically, the discourses, interdictions and the normalization relating to sexuality and religiousness of the settlers’ lives were also a support for the habit of abandoning children. The traces and fragments of these “little ones” are found in baptism books which tell us about boys and girls without families, exceeding and undesired lives, as the high rate of mortality in that institution indicates.