Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [148]
Thus a woman who went to the abortionist and got rid of her baby was committing a terrible sin against society. She also sinned against womanhood, domesticity, humility, motherhood, and obedience, and against the general image of moderation and self-control so crucial to the nineteenth-century mind-set. Jonas B. Phillips, an assistant district attorney around the middle of the century, cried out at one of Madame Restell’s trials that “Nature” was “appalled that woman, the last and fairest of her works, could so unsex herself as to perpetrate such fiend-like enormities.” (Phillips apparently had a direct line to mother nature.) “The gardener,” he went on, “watches with jealous care the seed he casts into the fertile earth.... But this defendant destroys the germ,” and “all for the sake of . . . base lucre.”84 The battle against abortion was tied into the general eugenic madness, the sense of contracting horizons and the image of threatened values so prominent an aspect of the late nineteenth-century cultural scene.
Infanticide was another crime more or less specific to women. Men, of course, are perfectly capable of killing babies, including newborn babies; but, practically speaking, this was a felony of women. And the killer was almost always the mother of the child. There has been infanticide in every period of American history—the colonial period provides some startling examples (see chapter 2). Indeed, abandonment and infanticide have never gone extinct. az It seems likely, however, that the incidence of infanticide reached its peak in the nineteenth century, and then went into something of a decline; but precise figures are hard to come by. ba
In England, in the late nineteenth century, there was a positive epidemic of infanticide, which gave rise to a good deal of public discussion. Hundreds of tiny bodies were found floating in the Thames every year.87 Most of these dead babies were never identified, and thus no one could be arrested or prosecuted for the crime of killing them. Infanticide was hard to prove in the best of circumstances. The act was done in secret; the mother, when caught, invariably argued that the child was stillborn or had died quickly of some disease. These events were, alas, all too common. As we have seen, English law, out of a kind of frustration, made it an independent crime to conceal the birth and death of a child; the idea was, the murdering mother could at least be convicted of something . The states had similar laws: it was a crime in New Jersey, for example, for a woman to “endeavor privately, by drowning or secret burying, or in any other way . . . to conceal the birth of any ... issue of her body, which, if it were born alive, would by law be a bastard.”88
Whether infanticide was as much a problem in the United States as it was in England is not entirely clear. There is some evidence of regional variation. The cases in England conformed, in general, to a single depressing pattern. The defendant was a domestic servant, incredibly poor, who became pregnant without benefit of a husband (or any male willing to help shoulder the burden). Somehow she manages to hide her condition. Economically, the child’s birth was bound to be a disaster; she would lose her job and be thrown out on the streets. For many women caught on the horns of this dilemma—sick, impoverished, at the end of their tether, abandoned—the only way out was to strangle the baby, or poison it, or drown it in a bucket. There were American examples, too. Mary Gardner was a servant girl in New York City who gave birth secretly and hid the baby in a chest, “wrapped in rags.” The child died, either accidentally or (more likely) after a beating. At her trial, in 1819, the jury showed mercy and acquitted.89
How often did women kill their babies in the United States? There are, of course, no precise figures. Abandoned children were certainly common enough. According to Edward Crapsey, writing