Infanticide, Infant Mortality, and the Racialized Construction of Fordist Motherhood

This article traces how growing concerns with infant mortality shaped the interpretation and policing of infanticide in turn-of-the-century Chicago. At the heart of the article are 1,270 suspicious infant death investigations from the Cook County Coroner between 1872 and 1911. We analyze two major shifts in the inquest language: the rise of increasingly professionalized medical language and changes in the inquest language of “neglect.” In the 1870s, coroners typically used “neglect” to suggest a mother’s ignorance or lack of access to essential resources for childcare. By the early twentieth century, a more punitive conception of “willful neglect” arose, which attributed infant death to mothers who failed to adequately care for newborns. Infanticide—the private practice and public response to it—reveals a new institutional order with enhanced biopolitical power in Fordist capitalism: household surveillance, the expanding authority of emerging professions, and elevated expectations for working-class mothers. In this context, politicians and new professionals focused on conserving infants as a valuable national asset through education and public health campaigns that aimed to eliminate “ignorant” motherhood. We argue these new initiatives to conserve infant life were racialized, and we explore segregated campaigns to train white and Black mothers. While white professionals’ endeavors were well supported, efforts on behalf of Black motherhood and infants solely came from within Chicago’s African American community, led mostly by Black women reformers who struggled with limited funding and a lack of outside interest

Blame · Coroner · Ignorance · Infant mortality · Inquest · Interpretation (philosophy) · Power (physics) · Seriousness · White (mutation) · American History and Culture · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Homicide, Infanticide, and Child Abuse