The Implications of the Body for Female Criminality

Abstract

This book has focused on the type of criminality with which women, historically, have been associated—child-murder and infanticide. By contextualising this crime within a framework of moral regulation, I have investigated the role of the sexed body in morally regulating infanticidal women during two different periods:

• (i) the moral panic response to female baby-farmers during the mid-nineteenth century when rates of illegitimacy and infanticide were at an historical high and infanticide was a largely unpoliced, hidden crime which rarely resulted in arrests and convictions; and

• (ii) the exaggerated responses to cases of multiple familial infant deaths which resulted in the wrongful convictions of three women during the late twentieth century.