Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2004 by Michelle T. King

Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000. Edited by Mark Jackson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. xiii plus 293 pp. $84.95).

Mark Jackson has brought together a solid if somewhat uneven collection of twelve papers offering historical approaches to the study of infanticide, which result in part from a 1998 conference on the subject. Though the book's title might seem to imply a systematic treatment of infanticide across a wide span of time and space, eight of the twelve studies focus on the 18th and 19th centuries, while nine of the twelve studies concentrate largely or exclusively on England. Given this relatively narrow framing, it is not surprising that while Jackson highlights moments of both "continuity and change" in his introductory chapter on the history of infanticide, the subsequent studies give the overall impression of thematic resonance rather than radical change. Accounts of 18th and 19th century English infanticide cases demonstrate, along with other cases from France, Germany, North America, Ireland and Poland, a marked emphasis on the "marital status and sexual behavior of the mother, while giving particular weight to the evidence of concealment of the gestation, birth and death of the child." (p. 5) These concerns seem to have persisted to the present day, as Julie Wheelwright investigates in her concluding chapter on US and British media coverage of contemporary infanticide cases. The remaining studies, arranged chronologically, add depth and texture to this general historical trajectory.

The most striking aspect of infanticide is its legal or criminal status, a perspective largely shaped by the court cases that comprise the bulk of relevant source materials. In their survey of records from 112 infanticide cases tried at the Court of Great Sessions at Chester from 1650-1800, J.R. Dickinson and J.A. Sharpe provide a composite sketch of a typical early modern infanticide defendant--an unmarried woman, often a domestic servant, bearing an illegitimate child alone and in secret, which was killed shortly after its birth. They also discern a pattern of declining indictments over the 18th century, a trend which Dana Rabin argues should be placed within the broader social context of an 18th century "culture of sensibility," in which the explication of a defendant's troubled emotional or mental state began to outweigh physical, bodily evidence in the courtroom. Practitioners of an emerging 19th century Victorian medical profession classified this perceived maternal mental instability as puerperal insanity, believed to strike certain women around the moment of childbirth. Hilary Marland examines this fascinating intersection of medico-legal discourse in her study of the usage of puerperal insanity as a defense plea in cases from the 1860s. Tony Ward traces changes in British legislation on infanticide from 1860 to 1938, in which the attempt to redefine infanticide as a non-capital offense exposed contradictory impulses of punishment and compassion.

Studies of infanticide offer insight not only into the intricate workings of legal systems, but also can shed light on broader social contexts. Patricia van der Spuy's richly textured study of an 1820s case in the Cape Colony, South Africa is one fine example. The social dynamics of the female support network surrounding a white slaveholder's unmarried daughter accused of infanticide, aided by a family slave and a free black woman, complicate simplistic notions of gender, racial or class solidarity. Amy L. Masicola reflects upon conflicting representations of virtuous and infanticidal domestic servants via one mid-18th century case, while Margaret L. Arnot explores the social world of the English poor through one mid-19th century case.

Infanticide cases can also be illuminating windows onto Victorian medical and psychiatric practices. One of the brightest features of this volume is Cath Quinn's deft and sensitive analysis of puerperal insanity in the late 19th century and its place within the newly developing psychiatric profession, as seen through medical journals and clinical photographs. Quinn reads this visual evidence, in which patients are demonstrably "cured" by their return to acceptable forms of dress, hairstyle and implied social roles, with much skill and sophistication. Jonathan Andrews offers a straightforward, largely descriptive study of the circumstances surrounding the discharge of "criminal lunatic" infanticide patients from Perth and Broadmoor asylums from 1860 to 1920.

The remaining two chapters, which lie outside the geographic range of England, have the most capacity to disrupt any overwhelming sense of historical continuity. Luc Racaut presents a radically different historical perspective in his examination of infanticide as part of the accusation of blood libel that Catholics leveled against Protestants during the eve of the French Wars of Religion (1592-99). Racaut's study serves as an excellent reminder that the discourse surrounding infanticide should be contextualized with geographic and temporal specificity, rather than resorting to uniform generalizations. This is the most troubling aspect of Johanna Geyer-Kordesch's contribution to the volume, which flattens the unique potential of its rich German language literary sources by interpreting the meaning of infanticide as a constant measure of women's freedom, an emblematic alternative to the social constraints of the "erotic plot" or "marriage plot," "whatever the time and place." (p. 95) Equally frustrating is Geyer-Kordesch's heavy reliance on secondary source materials with little in the way of primary textual evidence.