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By Root 1606 0

in 1872, there had been 939 foundlings in New York in the decade before he wrote—“waifs on the sea of sin.” These “castaway babes” were picked up off the streets and placed in public asylums “where most of them speedily, and as a matter of course, died.”90 John H. Warren, Jr., also writing in New York at about the same time, had harsh words to say about “baby farming,” or, as he put it, “in plain English, baby destruction.” These “farms” destroyed babies through starvation. The babies were unwanted, illegitimate children, delivered “into the hands of the baby farming mid-wife, the modem butcher of our surplus infant population.” Once in a baby farm, these children “never give their mothers, fathers, or anybody else . . . any trouble.” They die of marasmus; that is, they waste away, and that is the end of them.91 In Boston, in 1890, a private “lying-in hospital and nursery” apparently charged mothers twenty-five dollars to leave their babies; what happened next is suggested by the fact that thirty dead infants were found in the neighborhood 92

What Crapsey and Warren discussed was not quite the same as raw, unadulterated killing of infants.93 Indeed, “baby-farming” was a kind of fig leaf, a veneer of legality. Plain murder, too, was not unknown. Roger Lane found forty-one cases that went to trial for infanticide between 1860 and 1900 in Philadelphia. Twelve of the defendants were black. In one notorious case, in 1881, a woman named Lizzie Aarons had been found walking “ragged, nearly barefoot, without stockings in the snow,” and extremely pregnant. She was taken in to a lodging home by a sympathetic woman; the baby was born, heard to cry, but the next morning “its tiny body was discovered in the courtyard below.” In this case, too, the jury, obviously sympathetic, let the defendant go.94

This crime took place in Philadelphia, a great eastern city. Friedman and Percival studied criminal justice at the other end of the country, in Alameda County, California, for the years 1870 to 1910.95 Their research in court records and coroners’ reports turned up not a single unmistakable case of infanticide. They could hardly help concluding that infanticide was extremely rare in this moderately urban county. Was infanticide in fact rare in the West? And if so, why? Was the West less moralistic, less oppressive on unmarried mothers? Was the key factor mobility and (relative) affluence? In this country, as compared with, say, England, it was easy to pick up and drop identities. Women trapped in a system of poverty and shame, women who saw no way out, no hope, were the ones who were driven to kill. Where it was easier to change names, start a new life, pass oneself off as a widow, make a living, even remarry, the infanticide rate, one suspects, would be low.

Women Behind Bars

As we have seen, women committed few crimes, and were arrested less often than men. Naturally, then, they were poorly represented in prisons and jails. In 1850, women made up less than 4 percent of the inmates in thirty-four state and county prisons. The figures varied somewhat: 5.6 percent of the prisoners in New York’s penitentiaries were women, but women were rare sights in penitentiaries in the antebellum South. The governor of Virginia, William Giles, boasted to the “whole civilized world” in 1858 that “for the last four years, but one white woman has been convicted of a Penitentiary offense.”96

Women were mostly arrested for petty crimes; hence, there were more women in local jails than in the big house. Massachusetts had no women in the state prison, but the state put its women convicts in county jails and houses of correction, where they made up almost 20 percent of the inmates. Drunkenness, prostitution, and petty larceny were among the most common of their crimes.97 In Philadelphia, in 1860, the county jail held 309 white men and 66 black men, as compared to 57 white women, and 24 black women—a female population of about 18 percent.98

There were no freestanding, independent prisons built solely for women before the 1870s; in 1835, New York established