“I Did Not Want to Face the Shame of Exposure”: Gender Ideologies and Child Murder in Post-Emancipation Jamaica

TLDR: The authors examines 125 court cases of infanticide and concealment of birth that were reported in a Jamaican newspaper between 1865 and 1938 and were mainly committed by lower-class women.

Abstract: This article examines 125 court cases of infanticide and concealment of birth that were reported in a Jamaican newspaper between 1865 and 1938 and were mainly committed by lower-class women. Informed by recent medical, psychological and legal studies on child murder, it demonstrates that historians can gain a more complete understanding of child murder in the modern period if they pay attention not only to poverty and a stigma attached to illegitimacy but also to societal norms of mothering and psycho-social stress factors. And more particularly, it will show that in spite of attempts to bring them in line with the metropolitan ideal of a family of husband/breadwinner, wife/homemaker and legitimate children, most lower-class African Jamaicans continued to hold on to their own norms of family, sexuality and gender, which had been carried over from Africa and reinforced by plantation practices during slavery.