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  • Monstrous Mothers, Monstrous Societies: Infanticide and the Rule of Law in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England
  • Marilyn Francus

Infanticide has typically been defined by the rhetoric of monstrosity. “Monsters of Inhumanity,” as Addison called infanticidal parents, were characterized as “unnatural,” “horrid,” and “barbarous” throughout British Restoration and eighteenth-century texts. 1 Yet the infanticide statute, enacted in 1624 (21 Jas I, c. 27) was something of a monstrosity itself: in its rigor to prosecute the “lewd” mothers of bastards, the law presumed that unless the mother could conclusively demonstrate her innocence, mere concealment of a dead child proved infanticide. The law placed the burden of proof squarely on the defense, both to circumvent the evidentiary difficulties of obtaining a conviction without a witness, and to preempt the claim of stillbirth as a maternal defense. As such, women were convicted of infanticide based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence of dead children found in privies or closets, or testimony by witnesses who noticed maternal weight loss, illness, bloody linen, and the like. But as defendants started to marshal circumstantial evidence to prove their innocence—physical evidence such as childbed linen they had made themselves, or testimony from midwives or landladies whom they had contacted for laying in—the conviction rate began to drop, and continued to drop throughout the eighteenth century. 2 Robert W. Malcolmson concludes that the law “may have been observed with some strictness during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but by the reign of George II it seems to have been largely disregarded.” 3

Although the documentation of infanticide is less than uniform—the available Restoration court records, pamphlets, and Ordinary papers tend to be summary or sensational, unlike the detailed, comparatively dispassionate court transcripts of the Old Bailey Session Papers from 1715 to 1750—the pattern of conviction and acquittal that these documents outline is consistent. The Restoration courts convicted women accused of infanticide with a high degree of consistency; for in twenty-eight infanticide cases there were a total of twenty convictions, five acquittals, one deferred judgment, and two unknown verdicts. 4 The reversal in the conviction rate in the early eighteenth century is dramatic: in the seventy Old Bailey cases between 1715 and 1750, there were fourteen convictions and fifty-six acquittals. Although this precipitous drop in the conviction rate [End Page 133] was certainly linked to a shift in defense strategies, a reading of the Old Bailey court transcripts suggests that the success of the new maternal defense relied heavily on the court’s assessment of two other factors: the defendant’s socio-economic status, and her demeanor in court.

When infanticide was committed to maintain the mother’s ability to work (as it was in many cases), prosecution was not necessary to reaffirm society’s authority; for the choice of infanticide confirmed the power that the social order had over these women’s lives. While many decried the murder and abandonment of children, there was no significant effort to care for unwanted children until the establishment of Coram’s Foundling Hospital in the middle of the century. 5 If anything, the infanticide of lower-class and illegitimate children was not entirely unwelcome, for no one wanted more children begging on the streets or being abandoned to the care of the parish. Indeed, the willingness of society to recuperate these women—most of whom were single and working-class—back into the work force, suggests that socio-economic realities were of greater concern than the ethics and psychology of infanticide. 6

While the acceptance of lower-class infanticide effectively erased the defendant’s maternal identity (and charged her never to violate class or gender norms again), the adjudication of female behavior in the courtroom resulted in the erasure of female autonomy. As we shall see, the early eighteenth-century courts functionally categorized the accused mothers into two types, docile and rebellious, and consistently acquitted the former and convicted the latter. The women who presented narratives of female weaknesses, ignorance, fallibility, and repentant virtue were acquitted, for such narratives allowed them to be recuperated into the social order as chastened and conformist. 7 Conversely, the rebellious infanticidal mother renounced neither her agency nor her...

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