Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London

Joshua Stuart-Bennett (Research Associate at University of Leicester, UK)

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English

Routledge
27 May 2024

Family & relationships; Advice on parenting

Series: Routledge Studies in Crime and Society

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women’s ‘dirty work’, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation.

Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: ‘baby-farming’. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the ‘right’ kind of parenthood – especially motherhood – became paramount. As the ‘wrong’ offspring could jeopardise a woman’s chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman’s respectability could be ‘disposed’ of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and ‘infanticide for hire’. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming – including all possible outcomes – to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the period’s ‘civilising offensive’.

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.

By: Joshua Stuart-Bennett (Research Associate at University of Leicester UK)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9780367752774
ISBN 10: 0367752778
Series: Routledge Studies in Crime and Society
Pages: 148
Publication Date: 27 May 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Chapter 1 – Introduction Chapter 2 - Female Respectability and Its Consequences Chapter 3 - Discourse of ‘Farming’ Chapter 4 - The Marketplace of Motherhood Chapter 5 - An Industry of Disposal Chapter 6 - Conclusion Bibliography

Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett works at the University of Leicester and the Open University. His research interests are interdisciplinary with a special focus on historical criminology. This book is based on his PhD thesis.