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Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History. By L y n n Sacco. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. 368. $50.00 (cloth).
Lynn Sacco, author of Unspeakable, was an attorney before embarking on a second career as an historian. Law, like history, is a profession based on the pursuit of evidence and the ability to craft recalcitrant fragments of fact into persuasive explanatory narratives. Yet Unspeakable addresses a subject that has left an extremely ambiguous and elusive textual record, and its argument turns around the fact of that elusiveness. Through prodigious research in two hundred years of court records, medical journals, and newspapers, Sacco establishes that father-daughter incest was once widely acknowledged and prosecuted yet disappeared from American public discourse in the early twentieth century. How, she asks, did father-daughter incest become unspeakable?
Though nineteenth-century incest charges were leveled against genteel whites at more than twice the rate they were brought against more marginal men, Sacco tells us that by the 1890s both newspapers and medical discussions associated incestuousness with the poor, people of color, and immigrants-people who were widely represented as dirty, shiftless, undisciplined, ignorant, and vicious. Sacco explains this discursive shift as a reaction against increasing social diversity and suggests that such constructions of incest "affirmed the inherent superiority of genteel white males by representing a fictional border they did not cross" as increased social diversity threatened to challenge their dominance (40). At just the same moment, however, bacteriological advances made it possible conclusively to identify the presence of the gonococcus in vaginal discharge. Early twentieth-century doctors were therefore put in the awkward position of having to account for the frequent presence...