1993/01/01 by Leslie Page Moch, Rachel G. Fuchs · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #French Historical and Cultural Studies #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
paper · doi:10.2307/286950
openalex publication_date 1993/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
By anyone's standard, Marie-Therese Dubon needed help. Having lost her job, she had been unable to pay her infant daughter's wetnurse. The nurse's neighboring countrywomen had written that the infant was being left to starve, so Dubon had spent her last sous fetching her daughter. Because the wetnurse had refused to give up the baby's clothes until the debt was settled, Dubon returned to Paris on a hot summer's day in 1907 with the infant wrapped in her woolen shawl. By the time she reached the sweltering city, Dubon concluded that her only recourse was to end her life in the Seine river. But Marie-Therese Dubon does not appear on police records of retrieved bodies, in the registers of shelters for homeless women, on the lists of women arrested for turning to prostitution, or in judicial records of infanticide trials. Because her sister took her in despite the fact that Dubon's brother-in-law violently disliked her and she crowded their one-room home-she is invisible to the public record.' The poor women of Paris are most visible to the historian when they mount onto the stage in the well-illuminated record-keeping arenas of charitable organizations, the welfare state, the courtroom, or the hospital. Nonetheless, it is well known that the primary source of in-