Female Criminality

Infanticide, Moral Panics and The Female Body

A. Cossins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137299420
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This is the first book to consider the moral regulation of the female body through an analysis of the crime of infanticide. An in-depth perspective from the nineteenth century to the present, Cossins provides a revealing insight into the history of a little-known but widespread social crime.

1

Introduction: ‘Dumb Brutes’ and Murderous Mothers

Will the hen drive the chicken from under wing

And leave it to perish, the poor little thing,

Or will dumb brutes desert their offspring, ah! no,

What proofs of affection animals show.

Yet mothers alas their children will slay,

Or else pay another to put it away.¹

This introductory chapter launches a journey into the role of the sexed female body (defined below) in the criminalisation of infanticide and in the moral regulation of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the female body as a construct in two different historical periods when maternal infanticide became major public concerns: 1861–1870 and 1998–2003.

This book focuses on the moral regulation of women at a time when infanticide reached an all-time high, an apotheosis that, seen through twenty-first-century eyes, reveals the oppressive conditions of working-class women’s lives. For those who were prosecuted, their story was one of moral humiliation and moral triumph for society at large. The last stanza of a broadside ballad, quoted above and published in 1871 in response to one of the most infamous baby-farming cases in British history, tells a moral tale about human and animal mothers and those who were paid to put children away. They were called baby-farmers, she-devils or fell-butchers. Many people have never heard the term ‘baby-farming’, and cannot understand how a mother could sell her child to a stranger who, after pocketing the money, sometimes killed the child or neglectfully allowed it to die a slow, lingering death from starvation. It was common for baby-farmers to have a room full of unwanted babies, sometimes using adopted toddlers as child-carers. Some, however, tried to keep their adopted children alive against all the odds of cholera, congenital syphilis, diphtheria, dysentery and other common diseases, since a healthy, unwanted child was a commodity sought after by cashed-up, childless couples.

While the secretive trade in children during the nineteenth century was legal, the question is why thousands of children were sold or killed each year in England and Wales. To answer that, and to consider the social implications for women tainted by unmarried sex and the baby trade, this book will document a period characterised by indifferent governments, sexed concepts of morality and a morally punitive society by charting the development of the long-term moral campaign surrounding the practice of baby-farming from 1861 to 1872.

But why study infanticide? An investigation of these years reveals that it provoked the first moral campaign in Britain in relation to infant deaths in out-of-home care, even though infant mortality was excessively high as a result of disease and poverty. Infanticide resonated in a society that had been, generally, indifferent to infant mortality because infanticidal mothers were usually young, unmarried and working-class. In the middle of the nineteenth century, this combination created an explosive moral discourse that centred first on irresponsible motherhood and women’s innate immorality, then grew into an attack on all working-class women involved in out-of-home care—from the legitimate to the murderous. At the time, infanticide was considered to be the most ‘horrible and hellish crime that can be committed by a human being’ (Reynolds’s Newspaper, 6/8/1865, p.1).

Two case studies—the trials of Charlotte Winsor and Margaret Waters—will reveal the social reality of illegitimacy in terms of its economic impact on women and the role played by the media in what appears to have been the first moral panic concerning children in Britain, as that term is defined by Cohen (1972) and revised by Critcher (2003). At a time when prosecutions of infanticide were largely unsuccessful because of juries’ reluctance to convict, the cases that attracted the most attention involved not infanticidal mothers but carers, known as baby-farmers, who were unrelated to the child. These cases were not representative of all infanticide cases even if they amounted to the first police attempt to deal with a problem that was not amenable to criminalisation or criminal sanctions.² That large numbers of illegitimate babies were dying is not in question; that they were dying as a result of murder was the incorrect perception that was disseminated at the time.

A history of a particular crime such as infanticide is also a history of social life, revealing much about class and gender at a specific period. This book is not intended to be a complete historical account of infanticide, since this lengthy history is covered in many other publications, such as Hoffer and Hull (1981), Rose (1986) and Kilday (2013). Previous work (Carlen, 1983; Edwards, 1984; Heidensohn, 1985; Worrall, 1990; Wilczynski, 1991) has not interrogated the historical package of laws governing infanticide as a form of moral regulation and the role of the sexed female body in that moral regulation. Unlike other publications, this social analysis of the moral regulation of women reveals the relationships between men and women, the working and middle classes, the medical establishment and midwives, moral entrepreneurs and the media (Cohen, 1972), and between judges, juries and convicts during a very important period in Victorian Britain, which eventually saw the passage of the first legislation to protect children in out-of-home care. Underlying these relationships was the sexed female body whose biology, paradoxically, determined both her passive self-sacrifice and her immoral acts of wickedness and aggression.

The nineteenth-century discourse on the sexed female body emerged from an expanding and competitive media which, in exaggerating the characteristics of the infanticidal murderess for entertainment value, also ‘educated’ the public about the depravity of the working-classes in general and morally debased women in particular. These depictions increased social anxiety about the role of women, many of whom had been displaced from their traditional roles. Rather than being confined to husband and home, lower-class women had entered Britain’s newly industrialised economy as (low-paid) fulltime workers with out-of-home care a necessary alternative childcare arrangement.

The social consequences of this massive shift in work, home and childcare arrangements were, at the time, not fully realised, although the middle classes feared that high infant mortality rates would rob the country of the next generation of workers and soldiers. When cases of infant deaths in out-of-home care began to emerge, the spectre of infanticide rose to haunt Britain, with a group of influential doctors taking the opportunity to increase the influence of the medical profession by attacking those women who were involved in all aspects of birth control, childbirth and childcare. While infanticide had been on the increase since the late eighteenth century, the greater social problem—infant deaths from poverty and disease—was largely ignored in the moral clamour that surrounded working-class women and their ‘unnatural’ behaviour.

Moral regulation and moral panics

Nineteenth-century society in England and Wales was highly morally regulated, with moral campaigns and their inherent moral standards constituting individual identities by encouraging women, in particular, to engage in self-regulation in relation to a variety of activities. Moral campaigns may develop into moral panics when the processes of self-regulation are considered to have broken down (Hier, 2002, 2008). In such cases, elite groups known as moral entrepreneurs (such as politicians, religious groups, newspaper editors) campaign against certain individuals targeted as ‘folk devils’ (Cohen, 1972), a phenomenon that is used to justify particular coercive methods of social control.

By applying moral regulation theory to a study of infanticide during the mid-nineteenth century, the role of the sexed female body in initiating a moral panic will be investigated in order to provide a theoretical basis for moral panic theory, a foundational element that is considered to be missing in moral panic analyses (Rohloff and Wright, 2010). By theorising bodies it is possible to understand how the female body became the focal point of a moral regulatory framework comprising ‘good’ women who embodied the qualities of passivity, selflessness and modesty and ‘bad’ women who embodied carnality, heartlessness, selfishness and neglect.

The historical journey of this book also reveals the politics of infanticide as a crime, since the social and legal responses to infanticide raise questions about the cultural value of women, the cultural values imposed on women and mechanisms of control of ‘deviant’ women. The history of infanticide is characterised by debates about women as the problem, rather than debates about the social and economic problems experienced by infanticidal women. The climax of these debates was the moral campaign initiated by a group of nineteenth-century doctors whose focus on the evils of infanticide cemented the image of the evil, wicked woman who can turn her hand to murder, an image whose potency echoed throughout the twentieth century to, I argue, influence the outcomes in a group of multiple infant murder cases between 1998 and 2003.

By interrogating this history, what emerges is the social, cultural and economic spaces working-class women were permitted to occupy, with women’s reproductive crimes located and confined to the red-lighted streets of industrial cities, to brothels, lying-in houses, nurseries and baby-farms where illicit sex, abortion, childbirth, out-of-home care and infanticide took place. In particular, insight is gained into the cultural importance of the sexed body at a time when women were believed to be run by their biologically driven passions compared with the man of reason, who was considered to constitute the highest form of human development and intelligence.

This was also a time of considerable demographic and economic change. Beneath that change ran a sinister undercurrent of moral regulation that resulted in intrusive punishments of women whose bodies were ‘defiled’ by prostitution and economic punishment for unmarried mothers who ‘had forgotten their sex’.³ In the absence of state responsibility for this part of human life, childbirth, childcare and even infanticide were privatised, with midwives and baby-farmers left to manage tens of thousands of unwanted illegitimate children annually. The homes that were turned into baby-farms or lying-in houses constituted the cultural spaces where moral regulation had little or no regulatory influence; that is, until the sensational case of Margaret Waters in 1871.

Infanticide: A moral or criminal problem?

In this book ‘infanticide’ is defined as the homicide of a child under the age of 12 months. It is distinguished from ‘neonaticide’ (Resnick, 1970), which is the homicide of an infant within the first 24 hours after birth, and from ‘filicide’, which describes the homicide of a child of any age by its parent. Infanticide is the term most commonly used in this book, since the killing of an infant under the age of 12 months was the most common type of homicide committed by women in the nineteenth century.

A history of the law of infanticide shows that governments have used the blunt instrument of the criminal law to control the maternal body. The first such attempt was made in 1624 under the statute 21 James I, c.27 (An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children), which stated:

That whereas many lewd women, having been delivered of bastard children, to avoid their shame, and escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the death of their children … it is enacted that if any woman privately, either by herself or other, conceals the death of a bastard child, she, upon conviction, shall suffer death; unless she shall prove by one witness that the child was born dead.

As discussed in Chapter 4, so blunt an instrument was this statute that it was described as ‘an ordinance of a barbarous character’ (Safford, 1866: 225), since proof of burial or concealment by a ‘lewd’ woman amounted to a presumption of murder. Nonetheless, the provision remained in force until 1803 when Lord Ellenborough’s Act (43 Geo 3, c.58) reversed the presumption of murder and treated infanticide as any other type of murder.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, when there were calls for harsher punishments to discourage child-murder, Safford (1866: 225) recognised that, since the ‘severe measure’ of the James I statute was ‘found utterly useless to repress the crime of child-murder’ over a period of nearly 200 years, what greater severity could the criminal law provide? As Safford (1866: 226) and other social commentators recognised, child-murder would remain a fact of life as long as the Poor Laws made unmarried mothers liable for the upkeep of their children but made it almost impossible for them to secure maintenance from the fathers of their illegitimate offspring, as discussed in Chapter 3. If an unmarried mother succeeded in securing a maintenance order, ‘supposing the girl to have been sufficiently acute and careful to gather proofs [of sexual intercourse] against him’, the most she could receive was a paltry 2s 6d a week, a sum that was also allowed ‘to the housekeeper of a government department for the keep of each cat’.

What can we learn from this extraordinary period in the nineteenth century when women shouldered all the burdens of extra-marital sex with few solutions to illegitimacy other than infanticide, and the legislated upkeep for an illegitimate child was equivalent to that of a cat? Safford (1866: 226) was astute enough to ask:

What inducement beyond natural affection has a woman in that position to protect her offspring? None. But, by the murder of her child, is probable protection from open shame and ability to seek her usual employment, instead of being turned from her parents’ door, she and her infant both despised rejected outcasts, to seek a refuge in the prison or the workhouse, or to support her life … by still more awful misery [through prostitution], still deeper degradation, terminating in many instances by murder and suicide.

Safford’s conciliatory view about the obvious reasons for infanticide was not shared by most other social and medical commentators on the topic. The more common stance was expressed by the dogmatic Coroner for Central Middlesex, Dr Lankester (1866: 216), who considered that social ‘indifference to the destruction of newly-born infant life’ contributed to women’s ‘disposition to destroy it whenever it stands in the way of the selfishness of those whose sacred duty it is to secure its protection and welfare’.

Lankester’s view became the predominant one during the 1860s, when a group of doctors ‘discovered’ infanticide and began a moral campaign against working-class women, engaging in the politics of folk devilry long before Cohen (1972) used those words to describe an exaggerated, ideological reaction to a perceived social threat. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, this book focuses on the social construction of folk devils by identifying the sexing processes which produce particular sexed bodies of deviance, a phenomenon that infused almost all discussions, reports and articles on women and illegitimacy by casting the unmarried mother as selfish, immoral, debased and unnatural. By studying moral panics associated with sex and the female body, I will trace the development of that body at two different historical periods. The overall aim of this book is to chart the emergence of the sexed female body and its sensationalised characteristics as a particular type of folk devil in the mid-nineteenth century, and to uncover its influence in relation to a group of infanticide cases in the late twentieth century.

The incidence of infanticide in the nineteenth century

Stone (1983) has observed that variations in the homicide rate suggest significant social and economic changes in a society, while statistical trends in relation to homicide demand a qualitative interpretation (Sharpe, 1985). Certainly, as Chapter 3 shows, that seems to be true of a time when women were just as likely as men to be accused of murder. Infanticide was an offence that constituted a dark pool of female criminality, since it amounted to the most common crime committed by women during the nineteenth century. Like the gender division of labour in the workforce, there was a gender division in relation to murder, with most infanticide being committed by women—by mothers soon after birth or through abandonment of the child in a public place, by a midwife at birth or by a baby-farmer as a result of the underground trade in children.

But official crime rates do not present a complete picture of the incidence of infanticide in the nineteenth century simply because this was a domestic crime, hidden from public view, with children’s bodies easily disposed of and live births readily masked as stillbirths since midwives knew the ways to produce ‘a “quiet ’un” ’ (Wynter, 1870). While convictions for infanticide bore little relationship to the true rate of infanticide in nineteenth-century England and Wales, the prosecution of reproductive crimes in that century reveals a governmental focus on punishment rather than solutions to why women sought abortions, abandoned their children, murdered them or sold them to baby-farmers. Since the sale and purchase of children was known to be an everyday, legal transaction during the nineteenth century, this suggests that governments knew that baby-farmers provided a necessary social service. However, baby-farmer infanticide was distinguished from other types of infanticide because baby-farmers were involved in an economic crime, an activity frequently engaged in, compared to the young, unmarried girl who made a choice between her own survival and that of her child.

This is not to invoke the economic rationality argument for explaining infanticide, as Laster (1989) has warned, but to recognise that the public and the law treated infanticide differently, depending on the alleged perpetrator. Indeed, baby-farmers were operating in irrational social and economic times which, despite women’s responsibilities for raising the next generation, were characterised by a gendered division of labour, low wages for women’s work and the risks to infant life associated with urban working-class life without sanitation and running water.

Infant mortality rates during the nineteenth century were extremely high compared to today, with death rates for those aged under 12 months exceeding death rates for those aged 65 years and over. Paradoxically, murder rates by women were also at an all-time high, with the majority of victims being children. Even though women committed murder at a rate that sometimes equalled or exceeded those of men, rates of infanticide were outstripped by a factor of 100:1 by other causes of infant mortality. Yet the maj...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: ‘Dumb Brutes’ and Murderous Mothers
• 2. The Moral Panic Concept: Its History, Social Utility and Ability to Interpret Past Events
• 3. Regulation of the Female Body: Was Infanticide a Moral Panic of the Nineteenth Century?
• 4. The Moral Regulation of Infanticidal Mothers
• 5. The Implications of the Body for Female Criminality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index