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Article: "Acting out the Oedipal wish": father-daughter incest and the sexuality of adolescent girls in the United States, 1941-1965.
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- March 22, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The historical consensus on father-daughter incest during the postwar years in the United States is that it was fully and effectively denied--by social workers, courts of law, criminologists, psychoanalysts, social scientists, and ultimately the public at large. (1) Sociologists defined incest "as a rare sexual perversion, a one-in-a million occurrence," while the American Bar Association, on the advice of the psychiatric profession, informed judges that women and children "often lie" about sexual abuse and that therefore they could not be trusted. (2) Psychoanalysts and anthropologists, following the lead of Sigmund Freud and Claude Levi Strauss, characterized the incest ...