"I did not want to face the shame of exposure": gender ideologies and child murder in post-emancipation Jamaica.

On 8 December 1998 passers-by found a baby crying in the Mizpah district in Glengoffe. The baby was taken to hospital but died while undergoing treatment. Two days later the baby's mother was arrested and charged with infanticide. (1) Infanticide is not a recent feature of Jamaican society. In the late nineteenth century, about three women were charged with infanticide per year, such as the fourteen-year-old Leonora Lewis, whose newborn child was found in a toilet on 4 April 1897 and died four hours later. (2) A crime that was closely related to infanticide in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jamaica and one that was also almost exclusively committed by lower-class women, was concealment of birth, for which on average six women per year were prosecuted. (3) In February 1901, the Gleaner, Jamaica's biggest-selling newspaper, reported, for example, that Leonora Dewkins had been charged with concealment because she had "delivered of a baby, and buried it in a hole, and denied having given birth until the remains of the child were found." (4)

This article examines 125 cases of infanticide and concealment of birth (hereafter, child murder cases (5)) reported in the Gleaner between the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 and the island-wide riots of 1938, a period which has thus far received scant scholarly attention. (6) The Gleaner not only reported that women were arrested for killing their infant or concealing its birth but also provided reports of child murder cases that appeared in court. Most of the 75 court reports in the paper include the lawyers' addresses, the judge's verdict, a statement by the District Medical Officer (DMO), and also statements by the accused woman and her neighbours, friends and family. (7) The court reports mention four reasons why lower-class African Jamaican women committed child murder: a stigma attached to illegitimacy, poverty, social isolation, and mental illness. These reasons, however, do not fully explain why the accused women committed their crimes. This article aims to provide a more complete account of child murder cases in post-1865 Jamaica by placing the crimes within their socio-economic and cultural context and by drawing upon recent research on child murder.

The article is particularly concerned to determine the extent to which the accused women were motivated by societal ideas about female sexual behaviour and motherhood. The accused women were not only exposed to their own community's ideas of womanhood, however, but also to those of the colonial elite, which consisted of the small number of whites in the island and a middle-class of predominantly light-skinned African Jamaicans. (8) The elite's ideas of womanhood were espoused in the schoolroom, the church and chapel, and the press. They come to the fore not only in the lawyers' addresses and the judges' verdicts but also in the Gleaner's editorials and letters written by white Jamaican men and women to the paper in response to particular child murder cases. By comparing the elite's views on womanhood with those articulated by the accused women and African Jamaican witnesses, the article will demonstrate that in spite of attempts to bring them in line with the metropolitan ideal of a family consisting 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.

The comparison of elite and lower-class African Jamaican ideas of femininity will also demonstrate more generally that child murder can provide historians with a useful window into a society's gender ideologies because it deals with women's quintessential difference from men: their ability to give birth. This ability has been seen as not only marking out women's difference from men but also as producing within women a uniquely female identity. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women's reproductive capacity was increasingly linked to such character traits as nurturance, patience, and lack of competitiveness, and it was argued that women not only had the capacity to give birth but also a built-in set of abilities and desires to take care of children and that they should thus be the sole carers of children. (9) This construction of women as natural maternal beings had implications for the way female sexuality was viewed. For centuries, it had been argued that women had a greater sex drive than men. In the course of the eighteenth century, however, women were asked to control their sexual urges before and after marriage, while in the early nineteenth century it was more and more argued that women did not have an innate sex drive and that their feelings were only invoked through love in marriage. (10) This shift from active to passive female sexuality served to ensure that women would fully devote themselves to their prime duty--childbearing and childrearing--so that men could acquire economic, political and social power and hence sustain their dominant position in society. (11) The following will illustrate that the public debate about and the legal processes surrounding child murder in the modern period (here 1750 till 1945) provide an excellent insight into the construction of natural and asexual motherhood and its impact on women's feelings and attitudes towards mothering.

By unravelling the reasons why lower-class African Jamaican women committed child murder between 1865 and 1938, this article will fill a gap in the scholarship on Jamaican history. Most scholars have concentrated on the period of slavery and the immediate post-emancipation period (1838-65). Patrick Bryan's The Jamaican People 1880-1902 (1991) and Brian Moore's and Michele Johnson's Neither Led Nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920 (2004) are the only book-length, social-cultural histories of post-1865 Jamaica. (12) These texts, along with Erna Brodber's The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica 1907-1944 (2004) and some articles that have been published in recent years, have not ignored gender relations in post-1865 Jamaica. (13) In fact, they have done much to illuminate the attempts by the colonial elite to make African Jamaicans conform to metropolitan gender ideals and the responses of the African Jamaican population to these attempts. (14) Although these works conclude that the responses reflect the desire of African Jamaicans to stick to their own gender ideals, they do not provide much of an insight into these ideals because they are mainly based on sources produced by white residents and visitors. Their reliance on these sources is not surprising, considering the lack of materials produced by African Jamaicans. Especially the voices of lower-class African Jamaicans are largely absent from the archives. Their voices, however, can be heard in the Gleaner's court reports and provide a unique insight into their ideas about appropriate gender behaviour. Prostina Reid, for instance, told the jury that if her husband who "was a churchman" had known that Eva Brown, who was an unmarried mother of four, had been pregnant, he would not have allowed her to stay in his house. (15) Prostina Reid was convinced, in other words, that a woman should only conceive within marriage. African Jamaicans, however, did not speak with one voice in the courtroom. We shall see that there were also witnesses who approved of childbirth within a non-legal relationship.

As transcripts of trials, especially in case of acquittals, were not usually kept by the courts, and those that were have suffered from neglect, the Gleaner's court reports are an indispensable source of information for the value-system of lower-class African Jamaicans in the post-1865 period. They are, however, not without their problems. The Gleaner employed journalists who were skilled in shorthand and worked separately from court stenographers. Because of the acoustics in the court room, however, they were not always able to follow what was being said. Hence not all the witness statements were published verbatim. Some journalists also rephrased statements that were delivered in dialect. (16) And finally, the witness statements were not free self-styled accounts but were structured by the directions of the questions, which in turn were largely determined by the rules of evidence and the practices of the court.

The article is divided into five sections. The first provides information that is essential to understand the analysis of the 125 cases. The second discusses the motives mentioned in the editorials, letters, and court reports. Not mentioned as a motive in this material is the norm of mothering, which, according to recent studies on child murder, is one of the main motives. Cheryl Meyer has argued, for instance, in her Mothers Who Kill Their Children (2001) that infanticide "may be understood as a response to the societal construction of and constraints upon mothering." (17) The third section therefore explores the elite and non-elite ideas about motherhood that come to the fore in the Gleaner's accounts of child murder and also illustrates the extent to which the accused women had internalised these ideas. Also absent in the editorials, letters and court reports are a number of psycho-social stress factors, such as the lack of extensive childcare. These factors are explored in the fourth section.

The last section sums up the ways in which gender ideologies intersected with child murder in post-1865 Jamaica. It also relates these findings to existing work on child murder in the modern period, most of which deals with Europe. (18) This work has largely focussed on the rate of child murder trials. It has concluded that the number of women brought to court on account of child murder declined from the late nineteenth century onwards and that after the turn of the twentieth century, both juries and the state were generally lenient towards women accused of child murder. In France, for example, annual infanticide charges fell from 224.4 in 1871 to 117.8 in 1900, while the number of women acquitted of infanticide during this period rose from 32.1 to 43.3 per cent. (19) And as early as 1871, Germany defined infanticide as a separate and non-capital crime, followed by France in 1901 and Britain in 1922. (20) Existing work has also paid considerable attention to the women convicted of child murder and their motives. It has argued that it was mainly young, unmarried women who worked as domestic servants and came from rural communities who committed child murder because their low wages did not enable them to support a child or because they did not want their families to find out that they had conceived outside of wedlock. (21) This article will not only show that child murder in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jamaica mirrored in many ways that in Europe but also argue that historians can achieve a fuller explanation of child murder in the modern period if they pay attention to circumstances other than poverty and societal ideas about female sexual purity.

Before providing a framework for the analysis of the newspaper reports, it first of all needs to be stressed that the aim of this study is to provide an explanation for the phenomenon of child murder in post-1865 Jamaica and not to trace changes in the incidence of and the motives for child murder over time. And second, that most of the evidence provided, relates to the period after the turn of the century. This stems not only from the fact that court reports became more elaborate during this period but also because existing scholarship on post-1865 Jamaica makes it easier to contextualise these than earlier reports.

I

Most infant deaths mentioned in the Gleaner were neonatal deaths (occurring within the first 24 hours of life) and were reported by neighbours. (22) This contrasts with child murder cases in other localities at the time. In post-bellum Richmond, Virginia, for instance, the police was seldom able to obtain relevant information from residents in the neighbourhood where a dead child was found. (23) To understand this difference, we need to know that most of the accused women lived in a yard, that is a large group of houses or huts built around a yard. As yard residents shared toilets and cooked and washed together, they were able to closely monitor each other's lives. (24) The newspaper account that mentioned the arrest of Arabella Livermore on 28 August 1905 on account of infanticide stated, for instance, that it had been observed by "the other residents on the premises that she was enciente (pregnant)." When one of the yard residents had noticed that Arabella's condition had looked "strange," a search was undertaken for her child. The child was soon found in an outroom and the police notified. (25)

Most of the women accused of killing their newborn infant or concealing its birth had, like Arabella, delivered the child on their own, disposed of the body, and returned to their room. The infant's body was usually quickly found by one of the neighbours and the police were informed. The accused woman was then taken to the police station and charged with murder or concealment, while the DMO performed a post-mortem on the infant's body. Not long thereafter, a preliminary examination was held at a resident magistrate's court (26) in which the DMO was asked to state whether the neonatal death was a case of murder or stillbirth. This was not always easy in cases where there were no clear marks of physical violence. In such cases, the DMO performed the so-called float test. A piece of lung was put in water. If the piece floated, it meant that it had air in it and that the child must have breathed upon birth. This basic piece of forensic evidence served to uphold the charge of murder. In cases where the float-test proved negatively or where the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, the charge of concealment was sustained or a charge of murder was changed into one of concealment.

If it was decided in the preliminary investigation that a prima facie case had been made out against the accused woman, the case proceeded to circuit court. (27) Forty per cent of the neonatal deaths that appeared before the circuit courts were infanticide cases. Most women accused of murdering their newborn infant argued that their child had been born dead or that it had been born alive but that she had fainted and that when she came to, the child had stopped breathing. To support their client's case, the defence usually questioned the DMO's evidence. DMO Andrew Thomson, for example, had to admit in January 1915 that the bruise on Mathilda Johnson's child could not only be the result of "someone pinching the lips together," but also, as Mathilda's lawyer suggested, of a fall on its face because its mother had fainted. (28) The Mathilda Johnson case was not the only one in which statements by the DMO and other witnesses failed to uphold a murder charge. In such cases, the jury was asked to return a verdict of manslaughter, concealment of birth, or acquittal. Of all women charged with the murder of their newborn infant, 41 per cent were found guilty of murder, 14 per cent of manslaughter, 34 per cent of concealment of birth, and 11 per cent were acquitted. (29) Those found guilty of manslaughter and concealment of birth were given prison sentences, ranging from six months to three years. Most of the women found guilty of murder were sentenced to death. As in metropolitan society, however, most of them had their sentences eventually reduced to a lengthy term of penal servitude.

The majority of the neonatal deaths that appeared before the circuit courts were concealment of birth cases, of which nearly twenty per cent ended in acquittal. As in the mother country, juries were often sympathetic to the plight of the accused women and recommended mercy. As a result, only a few women who were found guilty received the maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment, while the majority were given a prison sentence of six to twelve months. From the First World War onwards, they were, like women in metropolitan society, also increasingly given a fine and put on probation. Some young girls were offered the option of spending their probation in the Salvation Army Girls' Home. The Salvation Army provided them with a training in domestic skills and also found them a place of employment when their term came to an end. (30)

Although attitudes towards women who committed child murder were lenient in Jamaica during the period under discussion, they were not as lenient as in the mother country at the time. The number of acquittals for concealment of birth in London between 1839 and 1906, for instance, was nearly 32 per cent. (31) And it was not only women found guilty of concealment that were put on probation in metropolitan society but also those found guilty of killing their newborn infant. In 1923-27, 5 per cent of all women charged with murdering their infant were put on probation, rising to 23 in 1933-37. (32) This and the fact that infanticide was only made a separate and non-capital crime in Jamaica in 1935 lend support to the idea articulated in recent years by scholars of colonialism that the transition of penal practices was different in the colonies than in the metropole. (33) Post-emancipation Jamaica, however, mirrored the mother country more closely in terms of the characteristics of the women who committed child murder. Nearly 60 per cent of the accused women were in their late teens. The deceased child was usually their first-born and the result of a casual relationship. This group of women received far more attention from the commentators in the Gleaner than those who were already mothers. Only a few accused women were married, which is unsurprising because of the pattern of family formation in lower-class African Jamaican society at the time. Most lower-class African Jamaican women had their first child in their late teens and early twenties as a result of an informal relationship. Not long thereafter, they usually met another man with whom they entered into a visiting union (a non-residential sexual relationship) and had one or more children with him. This or another visiting union led in most instances to cohabitation, which in turn could culminate into marriage. (34) Contemporary observers interpreted this pattern of family formation as an aversion to marriage. Scholars today, however, argue that this pattern reflects the extent to which African Jamaicans held marriage up as an ideal and a condition that bestowed social prestige. (35) A couple only decided to marry if they had the financial means to afford a lavish wedding and a house, and if they were convinced that they wanted to spend the rest of their lives together. As these criteria were usually not met before a couple was in their forties, the marriage rate in the island was very low. It averaged about 5 per 1,000 of the population, compared to 16 per 1,000 in metropolitan society at the time. (36)

Many accused women, including those who had children, had recently moved to Kingston or another town in the island in order to seek work as a domestic servant, which was one of the best-paid positions for a lower-class, uneducated African Jamaican woman. Their movement should be seen within light of high levels of rural distress at the time, including high unemployment levels, reduced wages, and increased living costs. (37) A lack of knowledge about 'the facts of life' explains to some extent why so many young girls found themselves pregnant not long after moving away from their family home. Lower-class African Jamaican mothers did their utmost to protect their daughters' virtue. They, for instance, gave them domestic chores to do after school, did not allow them to go to dances on their own, and punished their daughters if they were seen walking with men. The churches and various voluntary organisations also instilled in young rural girls the lesson that it was important to stay away from men but like the mothers, they also failed to inform the girls why they had to stay away from men. As Jamaican schools did not teach sex education until after independence, most girls arrived in Kingston and other towns with little or no understanding that sexual intercourse was involved in childbearing. (38)

Living and working conditions further explain the high pregnancy rate amongst young female migrants. Most female migrants rented a room in a yard where they met a variety of men. As they were away from their mother, they easily accepted their offers to go out. The journey that they undertook from the yard to their place of work also brought them in contact with potential seducers, while at work they faced the risk of sexual abuse by their employer, his son, and male visitors. (39) Realising that the living and working conditions threatened the sexual purity of young female migrants, several voluntary organisations offered 'decent' forms of leisure, such as home-making classes and single-sex dances. Few female migrants availed themselves of these leisure activities, not only because they disliked the emphasis that the organisations placed on moral guidance but also because they found these activities less attractive than those on offer in the yards. The Salvation Army and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) also tried to counteract the sexual threat posed by the yard by setting up a hostel for women in Kingston. The rules and regulations of the hostels and the high rent charged, explain why most female migrants preferred to rent a room in a yard. (40)

As many female migrants who were already mothers had left their child(ren) in the care of their mother or another relative, they also faced a set of sexual challenges and thus the risk of pregnancy, as is clearly exemplified by Estella Brown, a twenty-three-year-old who was charged in March 1932 with murdering her newborn infant. Estella had moved to Smithville to seek work, leaving her twins with her mother and stepfather. Shortly after arriving in Smithville, she had "become friendly" with a male co-worker. She mentioned in her statement that since she had returned home, she had not "heard from him or seen him since" and did not know "where to find him." (41) According to the Gleaner's editors and the men and women who wrote letters to the paper on child murder (hereafter, commentators), the lack of financial support from the reputed father was one of the main reasons why women killed their newborn infants. The following section will show that Estella's crime and that of many other accused women cannot or can only marginally be explained in terms of the father's failure to take responsibility for his child. It first explores the reasons for infanticide mentioned by the commentators and then moves on to discuss the reasons for both infanticide and concealment of birth put forward in the court reports.

II

Around the turn of the century, commentators in the Gleaner argued, like those who participated in the metropolitan debate about infanticide, that infanticide assumed epidemic proportions and that it was mainly committed by young women who had conceived outside of wedlock and saw their child as "proof of their sin." (42) In his response to the governor's decision in November 1906 to pardon Margaret Foster, a woman who had been sentenced to death for killing her newborn infant, editor Herbert G. DeLisser mentioned, for instance, that "fear of consequences--shame--has driven many a girl to make away with her illegitimate child." (43) His predecessor W. P. Livingstone emphasised in his writings on infanticide in particular the lack of financial support from the reputed father. He believed that if the reputed father could be forced to take on a portion of "the trouble and expenses occasioned in bringing up the child," a woman would "think twice before resorting to the extremity." (44)

During the interwar years, some commentators became less condemning of the reputed father. In June 1926 the Legislative Council (45) discussed a bill to raise the contribution that fathers had to make under the Bastardy Law. One letter writer argued that this bill would not lead to a decline in infanticide because the government had failed since the last amendment to the Bastardy Law to enable reputed fathers "to discharge their financial obligation to their offspring," such as setting a minimum wage. (46) Neither he nor any other commentator, however, called for more and better-paid jobs for women so that they would be able to support their illegitimate children on their own. The absence of such calls stemmed from the assumption that women were naturally suited for childcare, while men were naturally suited to provide for and protect the mother-child unit. This assumption also underpinned some of the proposals to reduce the infanticide rate which aimed, like the Bastardy Law, to make African Jamaican men live up to the provider/protector ideal. The Anglican Reverend Henry Clarke, for example, favoured the compulsory registration of fathers of illegitimate children as the best means to tackle the problem of infanticide. In one of his many calls for such a law, he emphasised that it was "the natural obligation" of fathers to protect and provide for their children. (47)

As infanticide was seen as "a symptom of a low moral tone" in the island, some commentators also proposed education in correct moral behaviour as a means to lower the infanticide rate. W. P. Livingstone, for instance, praised the churches for trying to raise the moral standards of the population, while calling upon the government to give "the people a good education." (48) He also suggested harsher sentences. In April 1897, Ethel Alberga, a mother of three, was found guilty of murdering her newborn infant but was sent to the mental hospital in Kingston because evidence suggested that she had been "insane at the time." After the birth of each of her children, she had been "very weak, very nervous and very depressed" and had "picked" at her children "the same as a fowl." (49) Livingstone was convinced that the verdict in this case would encourage women to "premeditate infanticide" because with a "slight exhibition of mania--the easiest of all mental conditions to simulate--" and a "clever lawyer" any woman could get a lenient sentence. (50)

Livingstone's call to meet out harsher sentences on child murderesses was based on the assumption that a person is a person and that murder is murder. After the turn of the century, however, it was increasingly argued, as in metropolitan society, that child murder was different from adult murder and should thus be punished more leniently. Herbert G. DeLisser, for instance, believed that it was no more than appropriate that women charged with killing their children were convicted of a lesser sentence or, if found guilty, recommended mercy because infanticide was due to "extraordinary circumstances," including the mental changes that some women experienced during the delivery. (51) Such sympathetic views explain why after the First World War juries more often recommended mercy. It was not until 1935, however, before the Legislative Council passed a bill that made the murder of a child under certain circumstances a separate offence. (52) This bill followed the 1922 English Infanticide Act, which stipulated that a mother could be charged with infanticide rather than murder, if her baby was a "newly born" infant and if there was evidence that the delivery had disturbed "the balance of her mind." In such instances, a jury could return a verdict of manslaughter, while the judge was allowed to sentence the convicted manslaughterer to anything from life imprisonment to probation. (53) The 1922 Act not only tried to meet the objection that the murder of a child was not on a par with that of an adult, but also deal with the dual problem of proving that a child had been born alive and the lack of witnesses to corroborate the accused woman's story. (54)

The debate in the Gleaner, then, changed over time. The calls in the late nineteenth century for harsher sentences and a training in appropriate moral behaviour laid some of the blame with the child murderess. After the turn of the century, however, she was mainly presented as the victim of the reputed father, the government, and the processes associated with childbirth. The remainder of this section will demonstrate that because they concentrated on young girls, were not fully aware of the living and working conditions of lower-class African Jamaicans, and were heavily influenced by the gender ideologies of their own society, the commentators in the paper, who were all white, overestimated the role of the stigma attached to illegitimacy and the lack of financial support from the reputed father, and failed to include social isolation in their explanation of infanticide.

The commentators in the Gleaner displayed an ambivalent attitude towards the sexuality of lower-class African Jamaican women. On the one hand, they argued that the women were governed by "primitive instincts unregulated by moral law," (55) while on the other they suggested that the women tried hard to live up to the norm of female sexual purity but were corrupted by irresponsible men. This ambivalence stemmed from their racial ideas and Eurocentric assumption about marriage. Like the white elite during slavery, they assumed that women of African descent were naturally more promiscuous than white women and that this made them inferior. At the same time, however, they believed that marriage was Man's natural condition and that thus any society, including lower-class African Jamaica, attached disgrace to birth outside of wedlock. (56) Although they were not free from European ideas about sexuality and marriage because they were born in or had lived in England, the lawyers and judges were less ambivalent about lower-class African Jamaican female sexuality. They divided lower-class African Jamaican women into two categories: those who attached disgrace to sex before marriage and those who did not. The Solicitor General stated, for instance, in January 1905 that "there were a great many persons who objected to having illegitimate children and others who thought it nothing" and that the young female migrant Mary Gibbons belonged to the former category because she "was ashamed" of her pregnancy and "would not make her mother know of it." (57) The division was presented as a class-based one. The lawyer who defended Catherine Forbes, a young domestic accused of killing her newborn son, mentioned, for example, that "it should not be forgotten that the girl was an ordinary servant girl. She had had a child before, and there would have been no stigma attaching to her having an illegitimate child, as it would for a girl of some social standing." (58) The lawyers and judges argued, in other words, that African Jamaican women who were one rung up from the bottom of the social ladder attached more value to sexual purity than those who were at the bottom.

Throughout the period under discussion, most of the accused women explained their crime in terms of the shame of giving birth outside of wedlock. The seventeen-year-old Elsie Miller mentioned, for instance, during her trial in February 1927 that she had buried her alleged stillborn child because "she was ashamed to let her people know." (59) It was not only girls in their teens, however, who mentioned this motive. Miriam Ellington, a mother of three who had recently moved to Kingston and was sentenced to six months' imprisonment in 1918 for abandoning her newborn infant, stated that she had hidden her pregnancy from her relatives and had abandoned her child because she "did not want to face the shame of exposure." (60) We should not read such statements necessarily as evidence that the accused women were primarily motivated by a fear of being abandoned by their family if it became known that they had had an illegitimate child. Considering the various attempts by the colonial government and the churches to bring the African Jamaican population in line with metropolitan norms of gender, family and sexuality in order to secure social stability, it is likely that the women hoped that by asserting their shame, they would be acquitted or found guilty of a lesser offence. (61) This is not to argue, however, that familial attitudes towards illegitimacy played no role at all in the child murder cases. Some, in fact, were committed at the directions of or even by family members, in order to keep the illegitimate birth a secret. When Martha McDonald was on her way on 1 May 1918 to get a midwife for her daughter Lilian, she met Daniel McKenzie. She told him that "I have been swearing that Lilian is not with child--now she take in to deliver." Daniel thereupon offered her his services. He helped Lilian deliver and then placed his hands over the child's nose and mouth, telling Martha that "you make everybody know that she is not in the way, then it would be a shame and a disgrace now." (62)

Contrary to Martha McDonald, Advira Walker's mother was not concerned to prevent her neighbours and friends from finding out that her daughter had conceived outside of wedlock. She allowed her daughter, who had recently moved to another parish, to move back home before the delivery, so that she could give birth in familiar surroundings. (63) Various other parents also accepted their daughter's illegitimate child. (64) This is not to say, however, that they did not uphold female sexual purity as an ideal. It has already been mentioned that mothers in rural areas adopted strategies to prevent their daughters from being seduced. When they discovered that their unwed daughter was pregnant, they usually turned her out but took her back in time for the delivery. Mary Brown, a mother of three who was charged in June 1912 with the murder of newborn child, was raised by and lived with her grandmother Eliza Hall. Eliza mentioned that each time her granddaughter had told her that she was pregnant, she had "turned her away" and "afterwards through compassion," taken her back. (65)

The social psychiatrist Madeline Kerr, who did fieldwork in rural Jamaica in the late 1940s, described the ritual of turning out pregnant daughters, which is still practised today, as "a formal expression of what the mother thinks the daughter ought to do." (66) The fact that it was not only upon the discovery of the first but also later pregnancies that girls were turned out, suggests that mothers wanted their daughters' sexual behaviour to take place if not in marriage than at least in a steady relationship so that they had a man to support their child(ren). That this ideal of female sexual behaviour put a lot of pressure on women can, amongst others, be deduced from the earlier-mentioned cases of Miriam Ellington and Estella Brown. Miriam argued that she had committed her crime because she did not want her family to find out that she had once more conceived outside of wedlock, while Estella mentioned that she had denied her pregnancy and hidden her alleged stillborn child because her step-father had repeatedly told her that she could not bring "any more pickney in his yard." (67) Estella's case suggests, then, that when a father's support was not forthcoming many parents resigned themselves to taking the child but that they expected to exert control over their daughter's sexual behaviour if she continued to live under their roof. Miriam's case, on the other hand, provides evidence that lower-class African Jamaican society did not, as members of the colonial elite suggested, think lightly of having children by different fathers. May Farquharson, the daughter of a wealthy white planter who participated in various reform movements in the island, mentioned, for instance, in 1938 that "there is practically no social stigma attached to the production of an assortment of children by different, and sometimes unidentifiable fathers." (68)

Statements by the accused women and their family indicate, then, that lower-class African Jamaicans valued female chastity as much as the colonial elite. They also illustrate that while most lower-class men and women believed that female sexual purity was hard to achieve and therefore accepted, albeit hesitantly, a daughter's illegitimate child(ren), there were also some who regarded a daughter's failure to live up to the ideal as a blemish on their own and their daughter's good name. The latter included men and women who were one rung up from the bottom of the social ladder. Rosetta Knapp, who was sentenced to death in June 1906 along with her mother Henrietta for having poisoned her eight-day-old baby, was described as a "decent looking girl" with a "respectable appearance." This and the fact that she and her mother lived in a house surrounded by a plot of land on which they grew bananas, illustrates that they were slightly better off than most lower-class African Jamaicans. (69) Active church members were also keener than other lower-class African Jamaicans to see that their daughters lived up to the ideal of female chastity. While her mother Miriam had attended "divine service," Omenia Christie had given birth to a child. According to the neighbours, Miriam had helped Omenia to dispose of the child. Miriam, however, firmly denied this claim. In the trial, which took place in May 1926, she stated that she had not seen "any infant or was aware of any." (70) Henriette Knapp and Miriam Christie, then, lend support to Moore and Johnson's contention that "the keenness to attain some social respectability within the colonial context made some working- class Afro-Jamaicans receptive to the dominant Anglocreole culture." (71)

The lawyers and judges agreed with the commentators in the Gleaner that it was not just social but also economic stresses that made women kill their children. By economic stresses, however, they meant not the lack of support from the reputed father but the women's low wages. Judge Clark, for instance, asked the jury to express their sympathy for Pauline Hewitt, a young domestic servant from Kingston who was charged in September 1926 with the murder of her newborn child, because she was a "young woman, and one from the country--and one without funds." (72) About fifteen per cent of all African Jamaican women claiming an occupation between 1865 and 1938 were domestic servants. (73) Women with little or no education preferred domestic service to plantation work and other types of unskilled labour because it was less back-breaking and better paid. Domestic servants were paid between 2s. 6d. and 15s. a week. If they did not live-in, they spent most of their wages on rent, food and travel. What was left, then, was hardly enough to support a woman alone and clearly insufficient to support a woman and her child. It was not only the wages, however, that made it hard for domestic servants to take care of a child but also the working hours and conditions. A domestic servant usually worked from six a.m. till nine p.m. and had alternate Saturdays off. It was entirely up to the goodwill of her employer whether she was given sick leave, annual holiday, or any other time off. (74) It is not surprising, then, that most domestic servants in the sample who were already mothers, had left their child(ren) in the care of their mother or another relative. It was not only these women, however, who saw their work as incompatible with childrearing but also their employers. The latter preferred young, childless women, not because they believed that paid work took women away from their prime duty but because women with children to support made unreliable servants, as they had to take time off from work when their child was ill and they often came in late. The employers' negative attitude towards servants with children, which was not unique to Jamaica, was put forward as the reason why Miriam Scarlett, who was sentenced to death in 1908, had thrown her young child in the river: "she could have got employment as a servant but for this child." (75)

The women's low wages were also held up by the lawyers and judges as a motive for concealing birth. One judge argued, for instance, that many women lacked the money to bury a stillborn child. (76) Although not as prominent as the stigma attached to illegitimacy, economic stresses also feature in the accused women's statements, especially during the First World War when a drop in the export of bananas and other changes brought about by the war caused economic hardship. (77) Only one woman linked her crime to the father's lack of financial support. Francella Walfall, a young plantation worker from the parish of St. James, was charged in October 1924 with the murder of her eighteen-month-old daughter. In May 1923, the child's father had left her and had since "given her nothing to support the child." As her stepmother could not afford to care for both her and her child, she had taken a job on a plantation, which was not easy to find at the time as both the shift from sugar to bananas in some parts of the parish and technical changes had led to a reduction in agricultural employment. In September 1924, Francella was dismissed and told to leave the estate because she had been unable to work one day when her child was sick and she could not find a childminder. (78) The Bastardy Law was supposed to help women like Francella. If a woman could provide evidence of the putative father's relation, an affiliation order would be issued for the payment of a weekly sum. Few mothers of illegitimate children availed themselves of this opportunity for financial support, while those who did, often failed to get the promised money. This stemmed not only from the difficulty of proving paternity and a lack of information about the way to get an affiliation order, but also from the lack of a machinery to enforce affiliation orders and, as some commentators in the Gleaner suggested, the sheer inability of fathers to pay the weekly sum, especially in the 1930s when the world economic depression caused unemployment levels to soar and wages to decline. (79) There were a few other ways for women to get support for their illegitimate children. Parochial boards gave single mothers one shilling a week for each child and there were several voluntary organisations that handed out food and clothes to poor mothers. (80)

Thus by ignoring the women's low wages and the lack of a social safety net for women and children, the commentators in the Gleaner failed to fully unravel the economic stresses faced by the accused women. As for their third motive--temporary insanity--, the accused women and their lawyers and witnesses accepted this as a legitimate reason as early as 1897. While W. P. Livingstone suggested that Ethel Alberga had merely acted insane, her father and family doctor argued that she had killed her fourth child as a result of "homicidal mania." James Alberga told the jury that shortly before the birth of her children, Ethel had always acted strangely and that for some time after the delivery, he had been forced to take away the newborn child because she would try to harm it. (81) Dr. Vincent Mullen not only confirmed James' statement but also mentioned that:

  In view of her past history, it was very probable that the accused
  might, in giving birth, become suddenly insane. The insanity might
  have developed quickly and passed away quickly and in that state she
  could have inflicted injury to her child. She would not have any
  control over herself. (82)

After the First World War, many DMOs argued, like Dr. Vincent, that insanity caused by the delivery could lead a woman to kill her newborn child or dispose of a stillborn child. DMO Arnold T. Clarke, for instance, argued in January 1924 that Ida Thompson must have been "unconscious of what she was doing" because "a woman in that condition"--young and just delivered of a first and stillborn child--"would be distressed of mind." (83) Such statements helped to reinforce the idea that because of their capacity for childbearing women were less rational than men. It needs to be stressed, however, that not all judges attached much weight to statements of insanity. The DMO in the Catherine Forbes case testified that "it was not very unusual for a woman to become mentally deranged towards the period of delivery." When asked by the prosecutor to elaborate on "the nature of this insanity in pregnancy," the judge exclaimed "oh don't bother about that. There is no defence of insanity." (84) Such attitudes towards pleas of insanity partly explain why it took thirteen years before Jamaica followed metropolitan society and made infanticide a separate crime.

The court reports also mention social isolation as a motivating factor. The jury in the Pauline Hewitt case, for instance, recommended mercy not only on the grounds that she was "without funds" but also because she was "absolutely friendless in a strange place and among people she could not approach for counsel or advice or for any assistance." (85) Young first-time mothers were seen to be especially at risk of social isolation because they did not know enough about the processes associated with childbirth to estimate when they were due or what to do when labour started. Although not as clearly articulated as the lawyers and judges, some witnesses also singled out social isolation as a risk factor for child murder. One of Pauline Hewitt's co-workers, for instance, concluded her statement with the remark: "I am a mother. I had help when I had my first child." (86) It was not just recent arrivals from rural parishes, however, who failed to approach fellow yard residents when labour started but also established yard-residents. While most of them did not seek help in order to keep their delivery a secret, some failed to call for help because they did not feel emotionally connected to other women in the yard. (87)

The court reports, then, provide a more comprehensive account of child murder than the editorials and letters. It should be remembered, however, that as the statements by the lawyers, the accused women, and the witnesses served to uphold the charge or achieve an acquittal or lesser sentence, the motives mentioned in them may not have played as an important role as suggested. The reports illustrate that both the colonial elite and lower-class African Jamaican saw chastity as an important marker of respectable womanhood. The following section will illustrate that both also regarded motherhood as central to a woman's identity but that lower-class African Jamaicans deemed it a more significant indicator of womanhood than the colonial elite.

III

There were not only mothers who helped their daughters to dispose of an illegitimate child but also mothers who reported their daughter's crime to the police. When Jane Mascoe returned home on 7 June 1905 and found that her daughter Elizabeth looked "different," she asked her "what she had done with the infant." After some time, Elizabeth admitted that she had given birth and pointed to the place where she had buried her child. Jane thereupon "dug up the body" and "sent for the police." (88) The importance that lower-class African Jamaicans attached to childbearing and childrearing largely explains why many accused women were reported to the police by their mothers.

Various residents and visitors to the island not only remarked upon lower-class African Jamaicans' desire for children but also tried to explain it. Martha Warren Beckwith, an American anthropologist who carried out fieldwork in rural Jamaica in the early 1920s, argued that it stemmed from a lack of old age insurance. By "being kind and generous with them when they are young," parents tried, according to her, to instil in their children the obligation to take care of them when in old age. (89) Madeline Kerr, on the other hand, linked African Jamaican women's desire for children to the myth that childlessness caused mental and physical disorders. (91) Both failed to see that for lower-class African Jamaicans, reproduction was a marker of adult femininity and masculinity. In her 1957 study of family life in rural Jamaica, the Jamaican anthropologist Edith Clarke concluded, for instance, that a "woman is only a woman if she has given birth and a man a man if he has impregnated a woman." She also pointed out that maternity was regarded as "normal and desirable" and that childless women were "objects of pity, contempt or derision." (91)

While childbearing was a marker of adult femininity, childrearing was an important avenue for lower-class African Jamaican women to gain social status. The community paid close attention to the dress, deportment and speech of children and judged mothers accordingly. (92) The English novelist Mary Gaunt observed during a visit to the island in the 1930s that women who mothered well were held in "great respect," whether they were married or not, and that most mothers were in "a far better position than the average mother among our peasantry." (93) Like the colonial elite, lower-class African Jamaicans expected mothers to look after their children's physical needs, display affection towards them, turn them into responsible members of the community, and treat their male and female children differently. (94) Contrary to the elite, they saw childcare as a responsibility shared by the biological mother and others. None of the witnesses, for instance, frowned upon female migrants who had left their child(ren) in the care of a relative. That it was considered normal to rear other people's children comes most clearly to the fore in Erna Brodber's study of 45 women born between 1861 and 1900. About sixty per cent had shifted homes as a young child and all had raised one or more children that were not their own. (95)

Historical forces explain the importance that lower-class African Jamaicans attached to childbearing and childrearing in the period 1865-1938. The West African societies where Jamaican slaves came from elevated motherhood because they believed that by giving birth and raising children, women guaranteed the link between the generations. Childless women were held in contempt in these societies but they could achieve the status associated with successful childrearing because adoption was seen as an acceptable substitute for natural motherhood. (96) Enslavement helped in many ways to continue West African ideas about motherhood. For instance, the encouragement that planters gave to childbearing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, such as offering slave women a cash reward for every successful delivery, helped to continue the elevation of motherhood. (97) The hard labour demanded of slave women and a lack of medical care, on the other hand, caused the death of many slave mothers and thereby facilitated the tradition of adoption. And the appointment of elderly slave women to look after young slave children so that planters could extract as much labour from their mothers as possible helped to continue other-mothering, that is the practice whereby friends, family and neighbours shared childcare responsibilities with the biological mother. As many scholars have demonstrated, slave motherhood was not a secure institution. A planter could, for instance, at any time separate a child from its mother. (98) Because of the adverse conditions for mothering on the plantations, the slave community bestowed an enormous respect on women who mothered well. After emancipation, African Jamaican women continued to face adverse conditions that helped to sustain West African ideas about childbearing and childrearing. The practice of other-mothering, for instance, was reinforced by the rural distress, which forced many women with children to migrate in order to seek work.

It could be argued, then, that by reporting the crime to the police, the women's mothers, friends and neighbours expressed their disproval of the women's decision not to take on an important duty expected of women. Some relatives and neighbours also tried to provide the accused women with medical aid before or during the delivery. Louisa Anderson, for instance, had rushed out to get a midwife when her pregnant roommate Agatha Banbury had complained on 28 August 1924 that she was not well. When she returned to the room, however, Agatha had disappeared. Louisa thereupon informed the police, who discovered the body of the child and arrested Agatha. (99) Attempts such as these can be read as a way to make certain that the women would not shirk their main duty. It is also possible to see them in a more positive light, namely as a means to enable the women to enhance their status in society.

Lower-class African Jamaican society saw motherhood not only as a woman's prime but also as her natural duty. It assumed that it was natural for women to want to have and rear children. One witness, for instance, expressed his surprise that Mary Rowe, a woman accused in April 1930 of killing her one-month-old child, had not nursed her infant when it had cried. (100) As a result, women who failed to take on the responsibilities associated with motherhood were condemned and/or described as abnormal. Elizabeth Stewart, for example, told Mary Gibbons that she had "disgraced" herself by burying her newborn infant, while Letitia Madden argued that her daughter Alice Walters had killed her second child because she had suffered from a "mental aberration." (101) There were also mothers who presented their daughters' crime as a temporary deviation from nature by emphasising their mothering skills. Mary Jane Gale, for instance, told the jury that whenever her deceased grandchild had suffered from fits, her daughter Olivia had rubbed it with asafoetida and camphor and that she had always been "kind to the child." (102)

The colonial elite also presented motherhood as a woman's prime and natural duty. The prosecution in the Arabella Livermore case told the jury, for instance, that "every mother is responsible for her child" and that women who disregarded their children's helplessness were not proper mothers. (103) It was especially by invoking the term "maternal instinct," which became more prominent after the turn of the century, that the commentators, lawyers and judges helped to naturalise motherhood. Judge Beard, for instance, told Alice Walters in August 1908: "You have been guilty of a cruel and unmotherly act. Whether your maternal instincts were subdued by shame or by fear, or by some passion that prevails in the human breast I know not." (104) While Herbert G. DeLisser agreed with Judge Beard and others that a woman could kill her child because her maternal instincts were temporarily restrained, he also argued that there were women who killed in spite of a very strong maternal instinct. He mentioned, for instance, women who had killed because they loved their child so much that they did not want to see it suffer from "hunger and deprivation." (105) The DMOs also helped to naturalise motherhood. One mentioned, for instance, that a woman "must know" that she is carrying a full-term child, while another stated that it was "an unusual thing for a woman not to know when she would deliver a child," especially if she had given birth before. (106)

The similarities between the colonial elite's and lower-class African Jamaicans' norms of motherhood should not blind us, however, to their differences. The colonial elite not only saw childcare as the sole responsibility of the biological mother but was also convinced, as we have seen in the foregoing section, that motherhood should follow marriage. As lower-class African Jamaicans regarded motherhood as the most important marker of adult femininity, many accepted that marriage could follow rather than precede motherhood. Their assumption that motherhood was a woman's natural duty led both the colonial elite and lower-class African Jamaicans to place women in an inferior position in society. Their African heritage, however, led lower-class African Jamaicans to give women a secure place within the wider kinship system as mothers. The extent to which the accused women had internalised these similar but also different norms of motherhood cannot only be deduced from remarks that they were "kind mothers" but also from their actions prior to and following the crime, as described by themselves and their neighbours.

According to one of her neighbours, Francella Walfall was not a proper mother because she had laughed when she had informed others about the death of her daughter. This 'bad' mother, however, had several days before the crime sewed a black ribbon for her daughter because she was told by a neighbour that it would prevent her child, which was born "with a caul," from "tormenting." It was commonly believed by lower-class African Jamaicans that children born with a caul could see duppies, that is persons who had died and whose souls returned to earth for those who had injured them in life. To ward off "the tormenting" caused by the duppies, the caul was dried and mixed with pap or sown in a piece of black ribbon with some garlic, camphor, and asafoetida and tied around a child's neck. (107) Francella's daughter was found wearing not only this black ribbon but also a red garment which she had put on her daughter in order "to keep it warm." This and Francella's remark to a co-worker that "I get it (her daughter) in sin and I will try and raise it" suggest that she cared for her illegitimate child and wanted to be a good mother. (108) Several other women accused of killing their newborn infant or concealing its birth also used dress as a means to express their affection for their child. Violet Smith, for instance, put a white night-gown on her infant before she buried it. (109)

The fact that many women left their child in a place where it could easily be discovered, can also be read as an indication of the impact of the norms of motherhood on the accused women. (110) Emily McCrea mentioned during her trial in June 1923 that she had thrown her alleged stillborn child in a pond so that "someone might see it and bury it." (111) Because of the inadequacy of their wages, there may have been several women, like Emily, who hoped that if they left their child in a place where it could easily be found, it would be given a funeral paid for by a local church or parish board. Some accused women even helped neighbours to retrieve their child's body. When one of her neighbours remarked, two days after she had given birth on her own to an alleged stillborn child, that he smelled something "dead about the place" and that the smell probably came from a heap of ashes near her kitchen, Mathilda Johnson, a mother of six, did not deny the smell and make him go away, but helped him remove the ashes. (112) Considering the remark of one of the witnesses that she had "always treated her children kindly," it is possible that Mathilda helped her neighbour retrieve her child because she felt remorse for not having taken on the responsibility for her seventh child. Several accused women who had also experienced the social rewards of motherhood expressed their remorse in a more direct way. Not long after she had placed the body of her deceased child in a rock, Estella Brown had told the midwife that she had "given birth to the child outside." In her statement, she argued that it was "shame" that had made her go to the midwife. (113)

These various indications that the accused women were influenced by elite and non-elite norms of motherhood suggest that there were women amongst the sample who would have liked to mother but felt that because of their socioeconomic circumstances they could not effectively exercise the duties expected of mothers. Thus like those women who were ashamed of having conceived outside wedlock and feared the consequences if this fact became known, their pregnancies were unwanted pregnancies. The following section will explain why many lower-class African Jamaican women did not use abortion or adoption as a means to deal with an unwanted pregnancy and argues that it was especially women who had a repressing style of coping with anxiety-provoking situations, who resorted to child murder as a method of solving an unwanted pregnancy.

IV

Recent research has shown that societies in which it is relatively easy for women to obtain birth control, abortions, and adoptions have low rates of infanticide. (114) Contrary to the mother country, there were no birth control clinics in Jamaica that offered cervical caps, spermatocides and other forms of artificial contraception. (115) It is likely, however, that during the period under discussion many African Jamaican women used, like their enslaved ancestors, herbal concoctions as a form of birth control. (116) In the late 1930s, various members of the colonial elite argued that the government should set up birth control clinics in order to bring down the high rate of population growth--1.7 per cent per year (117)--which put an enormous pressure on the island's resources. Some, however, questioned the viability of this method to tackle the high birth rate. They pointed out that lower-class African Jamaicans had such an intense desire for children that they would not use artificial means of birth control. (118) As for abortion, we do not know the extent to which it was practised but we do know that both abortifacients and surgery were used. The Gleaner reported, for instance, in November 1930 that a woman had died from an infection resulting from "an operation for abortion" performed by a certified midwife. (119) Adoption, as opposed to leaving a child in the care of a relative, was also a method available to women who did not want to take on the responsibilities of motherhood. During the interwar years, there were two government-sponsored and several privately-run foster homes. (120)

Several reasons explain why the women in the sample did not avail themselves of abortion and adoption. Abortion and adoption were a dangerous option for women who wanted to keep their pregnancy a secret from their family, because they involved the assistance of others. Abortion was also ruled out for many women because of the financial costs and health risks involved and because it went against the religious teachings with which they had grown up. And finally, the praise of motherhood and the desire for children in lower-class African Jamaican society led to very negative attitudes towards women who tried to forego motherhood by using birth control or undergoing an abortion or who abandoned a child that they could not properly care for. (121) It is possible, then, that some women in the sample had deliberately given birth on their own so that they could claim that their child had been stillborn and thus avoid being labelled a "bad mother."

A lack of effective childcare is also held up in recent research as a risk factor for infanticide. (122) It was hard for lower-class African Jamaican women who lived away from their families and who constitute the bulk of the sample, to find reliable child care. Following the example of child welfare organisations in metropolitan society, the Child Welfare Association (CWA) set up a creche in Kingston during the First World War. Whereas in metropolitan society creches were rapidly closed after the war, in Jamaica their numbers expanded. (123) Few lower-class women, however, used the creches set up by the CWA in Kingston and other towns because they charged a fee of two pennies a day and were located in areas that were too far away from where they lived or worked. (124) Most lower-class mothers, then, who lived away from their families had to rely on women in the yard or paid childminders when they went out to work. As these were usually old and/or infirm women who looked after many children, this was not an effective childcare arrangement.

It was not only the problem of finding efficient childcare and providing their child with food and clothes, however, that filled first-time mothers who had recently moved away from home with anxieties but also the sheer prospect of giving birth. Because of their lack of knowledge about 'the facts of life', they were generally unaware of the processes associated with childbirth. This is not to say, however, that female migrants who were already mothers were not worried about giving birth. As they could not rely upon their mother or other female relatives for support during the pregnancy and delivery, they felt most strongly the lack of a comprehensive system of child and maternal welfare services. In 1938, there were 900 registered midwives in the island. Of those who practised, nearly one hundred were paid by parochial boards, while the remainder was employed by privately-run maternity homes and voluntary organisations that catered for women and children. (125) Only the latter two groups of midwives provided antenatal care, along with the Victoria Jubilee Hospital in Kingston, which was set up in 1887 by the government in response to a high rate of maternal deaths--660.9 per 10,000 live births as compared to 230 in England--and served as a lying-in hospital for poor women from Kingston and as a midwifery school. Until the late 1930s, the Jubilee Hospital was beyond the reach of most lower-class women because it charged a fee of 7s. 6d. (126) As other public hospitals dealt only with emergency maternity cases and they could not afford privately-run maternity homes, most lower-class African Jamaican women were delivered by one of the few midwives employed by the parochial boards (one midwife per 4,560 women). (127)

Child welfare only took off after the First World War and was solely provided by voluntary bodies. The CWA, the Jamaica Women's League (JWL) and several other voluntary organisations ran free infant clinics in Kingston and some other towns; handed out milk and cod liver oil to poor children; and employed public health nurses in rural districts, who visited new mothers and their children at home. (128) It was not only their reliance on private donations that limited the scope of their services but also their racial and class assumptions. According to Mary Morris-Knibb, the first African Jamaican woman to stand for election in Jamaica, the white-led and middle-class based CWA did a lot of good work but failed to reach many lower-class African Jamaican children because it was not "prepared to go into the homes ... and demonstrate to the people lessons in hygiene." (129) The high infant mortality rate of 170 per 1,000 live births as compared to 100 in metropolitan society, however, stemmed not only from the limited scope of child welfare services provided by the CWA and other organisations but also from unsanitary conditions in the yards, malnutrition, and a general lack of antenatal and postnatal care. (130)

During their pregnancy, then, the women in the sample had to cope with numerous anxieties, including the fear that they could die during the delivery or that their child would die before it was one year old because of a poor provision of child and maternal welfare. A few women tried to reduce their anxieties by resorting to what in coping literature is called "active strategies." The young migrant Advira Walker, for instance, had gradually accepted the harsh reality that she was to become a single mother and had decided that she would move back to her parental home a month before the baby was due in order to get all the support she needed during the delivery. (131) Most women, however, believed that their situation could not be altered and therefore denied the reality of their pregnancy. A common form of pregnancy denial is "affective denial," that is when a woman acknowledges to herself that she is pregnant but experiences very few of the accompanying emotional and behavioural changes. She, for instance, continues to undertake strenuous activities, does not talk to the fetus, and makes no concrete preparations for the arrival of the baby. (132) Several accused women suffered from this form of pregnancy denial. When their neighbours, family, and friends made remarks about their weight gain or other visible markers of their pregnancy, they denied being pregnant. Laban Gregory, for instance, told the jury that he had regularly asked Mathilda Johnson about her "delicate state of health" and that each time she "had denied that she was enceinte." (133) Considering that Mathilda had told the father of her child that she was pregnant, she had acknowledged the existence of her child but had denied its emotional significance. Some accused women, however, denied both the emotional significance and the very existence of their pregnancy. Their significant others did not know that they were pregnant because the psycho-social stresses that they experienced affected the physical symptoms and experiences of their pregnancy, such as the cessation of their menstrual period. Suzette Thompson stated, for instance, in January 1924 that she had not been aware of her sister's pregnancy, even though she had shared a bedroom with Ida. (134)

Whether mild or pervasive, pregnancy denial usually results in the death of the infant. By denying their pregnancy, women delay prenatal care, which in turn leads to stillbirths or premature births. Women who deny pregnancy also tend to mistake labour pains for gastrointestinal symptoms. As a result, they often give birth in the toilet and their infants die of drowning or head trauma. (135) Catherine Forbes, who had managed to keep her pregnancy a secret for her sister Lilian with whom she shared a room, was one of several accused women who had given birth in the toilet. She told the jury that

  She went to work. She was in a delicate state, and a pain took her.
  She went in the latrine and before she recovered, the baby was born.
  She was frightened, and did not know what to do. She saw a bag, which
  she took and scraped up the body and threw the body in the pit. (136)

Only a few women in the sample who suffered from pervasive pregnancy denial had directly killed their infant. Lydia Thomas, for example, had been taken ill on 20 March 1911. When neighbours came to check upon her the next day, she took them to the place where she had left her dead infant "wrapped in a piece of cloth" and with a "piece of string around its neck." The latter and the external marks on the infant's body led the DMO to conclude that the infant had died from strangulation. (137) According to Margaret Spinelli, women who suffer from a pervasive form of pregnancy denial often experience a brief dissociative psychosis during the delivery because the reality of having a child is intolerable to them and which can be so strong that they actually kill the child. Once the reality becomes tolerable--they see the dead infant--, the psychosis resolves and they either make no efforts to hide the infant, like Lydia, or they realise that the child has died at their hands and they try to dispose of the body. (138) Although they did not use such terms as 'psychosis', we have seen that the DMOs explained some infanticide cases in a very similar way.

By mentioning additional stressors that women with unwanted pregnancies were exposed to and by invoking coping literature, this section has suggested that there were women charged with concealment of birth but who had most likely killed their child because other methods to deal with their unwanted pregnancy involved the risk of being ostracised, while there were also women charged with the "wilful murder" of their child but who had only indirectly killed it because of their repressive style of coping with anxiety-provoking situations. In other words, if we do not read the child murder accounts in the Gleaner within their socio-economic and cultural context, we risk overestimating or underestimating the extent of deliberate child murder in post-1865 Jamaica.

V

The women in the sample, then, faced intense emotions--the shock of being pregnant, the shame of having conceived outside of wedlock, the fear of being ostracised by their family, and the anxiety of not being able to live up to the norm of good mothering--which were exacerbated by a context of low wages, social isolation, a poor provision of child and maternal welfare services, and a lack of effective childcare. As most lower-class African Jamaican women managed to raise children amidst similar socio-economic circumstances, it can be argued that it was only the most vulnerable and most despondent lower-class African Jamaican women, who chose--consciously or unconsciously--child murder as a way out.

The foregoing has been particularly concerned with the ways in which elite and non-elite ideas about womanhood intersected with the child murder cases. The commentators' assumption that motherhood should follow marriage and that a woman's main task was to care and a man's to provide, prevented them from fully explaining why some lower-class African Jamaican women killed their children. We have seen that defence lawyers at times also articulated similar ideas in order to get an acquittal or a lenient sentence. Statements by the accused women and their family confirmed their idea that women who were one rung up from the bottom of the social ladder were more inclined to live up to the ideal of female sexual purity than those at the bottom. The lawyers also invoked ideas about motherhood in their pleas. They argued that some women killed their infants because of an underdeveloped or temporarily absent maternal instinct. Because they saw motherhood as belonging to the realm of nature, they did not suggest that the pressure that lower-class African Jamaican women faced to have and rear children, constituted a motive in child murder cases. This study has tried to show that the elite and non-elite idea that motherhood was a woman's main and natural duty and the fact that motherhood was a status-bestowing institution in African Jamaican society played an important role in the child murder cases. They not only help to explain why so many accused women were encouraged by their neighbours and family to seek medical help during their pregnancy or delivery or were reported to the police by their significant others but also why some women committed their crimes. Because of the glorification of motherhood, there were women in the sample who wanted to have and rear children. They, however, felt that they could not live up to the standards of mothering set by their community because of their low wages and a lack of help to raise children, both from their family and the government. The glorification of motherhood also led to very negative attitudes towards women who tried to forego motherhood. This largely explains why the women in the sample had not resorted to abortion or abandonment as a way to deal with their unwanted pregnancies.

Existing studies on child murder in the modern period have not ignored the role of ideas about womanhood. Most, however, have only considered societal norms of female sexuality, arguing that it was largely the stigma attached to illegitimacy that led many young women to commit child murder. (139) That this study has placed less emphasis than earlier work on the shame attached to giving birth outside of wedlock and has also included ideas about motherhood stems not only from the methodology adopted but also from the community that it focuses on. Because of their past of Africa and slavery, motherhood was for lower-class African Jamaicans the most important marker of adult femininity and a status-bestowing institution. They also differed from their counterparts elsewhere in that they frowned less upon illegitimacy. Their acceptance of illegitimacy was also largely an African carry-over. Most West African societies during the era of the slave trade accepted premarital sex. Conditions on the plantations reinforced this attitude. Because of the connotation of marriage with freedom and equality, Jamaican planters did not favour slave marriage. They especially tried to prevent Anglican slave marriage because, contrary to a marriage performed by a nonconformist missionary, it was regarded as "valid in law." (140) In their capacity as members of the Legislature, they inserted a clause in the Slave Law which specified that in order to be married by an Anglican minister, slaves needed written permission from the owner, had to pay a small fee, and undergo a detailed examination by the minister. As a result, few slave children were born in wedlock. (141) According to various scholars, the acceptance of illegitimacy in the post-1865 period should also be seen within light of the reluctance of the churches in the immediate post-emancipation period to adopt measures to spread marriage amongst the ex-slaves, such as refusing to baptise children born outside of wedlock. (142)

Lower-class African Jamaican women were of course not the only women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who experienced pressure to have children and live up to a high standard of mothering. Women in metropolitan society, for instance, faced a host of government-sponsored and voluntary initiatives in the decades following the Boer War that encouraged them to give birth and raise their children well, such as infant welfare clinics and mother craft, classes. (143) In other words, scholars can only gain a full understanding of child murder in the modern period if they include in their analyses of child murder not only norms of female sexuality but also norms of motherhood and if they pay sufficient attention to the socio-economic circumstances that affected women's ability to live up to these norms.

Department of History

Heslington, York YO10 5DD

United Kingdom

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank Johanna Baan and Barbara Schmucki for commenting on ideas presented in this study.

1. Daily Gleaner, 10 December 1998.

2. Daily Gleaner, 17 April 1897. The rate of infanticide cases is derived from the Blue Books 1888-1914, a set of statistics compiled annually by the governor. The prosecuted cases mentioned in this source underestimate the extent of infanticide in the island because the mothers of many dead foundlings were never located and many cases of infanticide went undetected.

3. The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act in England made concealment of birth a separate crime which applied not just to the mother but to any person. Before the Act, a woman was only charged with concealment of birth if there was little or no evidence that she had killed her newborn infant. Jamaica adopted this law around the time that it made the registration of births compulsory (1881).

4. Daily Gleaner, 18 February 1901.

5. The term "child murder" is used here to refer to both infanticide and concealment of birth because many women who were accused of concealment had killed their child, either wilfully or by not taking prenatal care or obtaining medical assistance during the delivery. The terms "infanticide" and "concealment of birth" will be used to refer to each category separately. The newspaper accounts used the term "infanticide," although until 1935 the charge was "murder" and not "infanticide". Infanticide is commonly understood as the killing of a child under one year of age. This article, however, also examines some cases in which a woman was accused of killing an older child.

6. These dates are important watersheds in Jamaican history. The rebellion led to a Crown Colony government which embarked on various socio-economic reforms, while the island-wide riots of 1938 are generally regarded as the first step towards independence.

7. Many accused women refrained from giving a statement, such as Lilian Greaves, who told the judge that she did not "desire to say anything or to call any witnesses." Daily Gleaner, 16 August 1924.

8. Whites constituted less than three per cent of the total population during the period 1865-1938.

9. On this construction of motherhood, see, for instance, E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London, 1976), chap. 5; L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 [1987] (London, 1992), chaps 3 and 7; R. Perry, "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 2 (1991): 203-34; and T. Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680-1760 (Cambridge, UK, 1996), 25-28.

10. On the shift from active to passive female sexuality, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 401-03; L. Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1988), 33-34; and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), 325-47 and 366-73.

11. Starting with Adrienne Rich in her Of Woman Born (1976), various feminist scholars have argued that motherhood is not a biological given but a social construct that serves to sustain gender inequalities. For a summary of this body of work, see T Arendell, "Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship," Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2000): 1192-1207. For more on the construction of women as asexual mothers, see Perry, "Colonizing the Breast," and S. Weisskopf, "Maternal Sexuality and Asexual Motherhood," Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 766-82.

12. Before the publication of these histories, Jamaica's post-1865 history was mainly an economic and political history and it was often addressed as part of a larger historical survey. See, for instance, J. Carnegie, Some Aspects of Jamaica's Politics, 1918-1938 (Kingston, 1973); G. Eisner, Jamaica 1830-1930: A Study of Economic Growth (London, 1963); and G. W. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica (Cambridge, UK, 1957). Moore's and Johnson's history mentions some infanticide cases in order to illustrate childrearing patterns amongst lower-class African Jamaicans. It suggests that these and other cases may, as in the metropolitan society at the time, have been caused by poverty and a social stigma attached to illegitimacy.

13. See, for instance, P. Charles, "The Name of the Father: Women, Paternity, and British Rule in Nineteenth-Century Jamaica," International Labor and Working-Class History 41 (1992): 4-22; H. Ford-Smith, "Making White Ladies: Race, Gender and the Production of Identity in Late Colonial-Jamaica," Resources for Feminist Research 23, no. 4 (1995-95): 55-67; B. L. Moore and M. A. Johnson, "'Fallen Sisters'?: Attitudes to Female Prostitution in Jamaica at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," The Journal of Caribbean History 34, nos 1-2 (2000): 46-70; and R. Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race Masculinity and the Development of a National Consciousness (Manchester, 2004).

14. My work on gender in post-1865 Jamaica takes a different approach. It concentrates on ideas of womanhood within the African Jamaican community and explores their engagement with notions of class, race, gender and locality. See, for instance, "Respectability on Trial: Notions of Womanhood in Two Jamaican Trials in the Interwar Years," The Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers 4 (2003), at http://www.scsonline.freeserve.co.uk/olvol4.html; "'The Misfortune of being Black and Female': An Examination of Black Feminist Consciousness in Interwar Jamaica," Third Space 5, no. 2. (2006) at http://www.thirdspace.ca/vol5/; and "Imagining Womanhood in Early Twentieth-Century Rural Afro-Jamaica," The Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 1 (2006): 64-91.

15. Daily Gleaner, 24 May 1924.

16. J. Ranston, First Time Up: Lawyer Manley (Barbados, 1998), ix.

17. C. Meyer, Mothers Who Kill their Children: Inside the Minds of Moms from Susan Smith to the Prom Mom (New York, 2001), 13.

18. For some notable exceptions, see P. Anagol, "The Emergence of the Female Criminal in India: Infanticide and Survival under the Raj," History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 73-93; E. C. Green, "Infanticide and Infant Abandonment in the New South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1915," Journal of Family History 24, no. 2 (1999): 187-211; M. Oberman, "Understanding Infanticide in Context: Mothers who Kill, 1870-1930 and Today", The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 92, nos. 3-4 (2003): 707-737; K. Ruggiero, "Honor, Maternity, and the Disciplining of Women: Infanticide in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires," The Hispanic American Historical Review 72, no. 3 (1992): 353-373; P. Scully, "Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa," Canadian Journal of African Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 88-105; and K. H. Wheeler, "Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Ohio," Journal of Social History 31, Winter, (1997): 407-418.

19. J. M. Donovan, "Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913," Journal of Family History 16, no. 2 (1991): 159-162.

20. On the definition of infanticide as a separate and non-capital offence, see C. Damme, "Infanticide: The Worth of an Infant under Law," Medical History 22 (1978): 1-24; Donovan, "Infanticide and the Juries in France," 157-176; H. Marland, "Getting Away with Murder?: Puerperal Insanity, Infanticide and the Defence Plea," in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000, ed. M. Jackson (London, 2002): 168-192; J. S. Richter, "Infanticide, Child Abandonment and Abortion in Imperial Germany," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 4 (1998): 511-51; and T. Ward, "Legislating for Human Nature: Legal Responses to Infanticide, 1860-1938," in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000, ed. M. Jackson (London, 2002): 249-270.

21. In addition to the works mentioned in note 20, the following also provide a profile of women who committed child murder and single out poverty and the social stigma attached to illegitimacy as the main motivating factors: D. I. Kerzer, "Gender Ideology and Infant Abandonment in Nineteenth-century Italy," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 1 (1991): 1-25; R. Sauer, "Infanticide and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century Britain," Population Studies 32, no. 1 (1978): 81-93; and S. Wilson, "Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Female Honour in Nineteenth-Century Corsica," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 4 (1988): 762-83.

22. About five per cent of the cases were post-neonatal deaths (from the first day through eleven months of age) and were caused by poisoning, drowning, and extreme physical violence.

23. Green, "Infanticide and Infant Abandonment in the New South," 203.

24. For an excellent insight into the Kingston yards, see B. L. Moore and M. A. Johnson, eds., Squalid Kingston, 1890-1920: How the Poor Lived, Moved and had their Being (Mona, West Indies, 2000).

25. Daily Gleaner, 29 August 1905.

26. A resident magistrate's court was the lowest level of court in the island. It was presided over by two or more Justices of the Peace and dispensed summary justice as well as holding preliminary investigations into personal violence cases.

27. Circuit courts were an inferior trial-level court in which only barristers could appear. During the period under discussion, there were several African Jamaican barristers who had been trained in England. As the judge rode the 'circuit' to hold trials, it usually took several weeks before a case of infanticide or concealment of birth appeared before circuit court.

28. Daily Gleaner, 29 January 1915.

29. As not all newspaper reports of child murder cases mentioned the verdict, these figures are based on only 37 infanticide cases. This is a rather low acquittal rate compared to that in Britain at the time. Between 1839 and 1906, for example, nearly 85 per cent of all women charged with the murder of their newborn infant in London were acquitted. This difference in acquittal rates can largely be explained by the fact that in Jamaica the jury could return one of four verdicts, whereas in Britain a woman charged with the murder of her infant could only be found guilty or not and subsequently be retried for manslaughter or concealment of birth. See, A. R. Higginbotham, "'Sin of the Age': Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London," Victorian Studies, spring (1989), 330.

30. The Salvation Army operated a probation system by government consent. In 1937, one fourth of all women put on probation were sent to the Salvation Army's Girls' Home. Annual Report of the Prisons 1937, Colonial Office (hereafter, CO) 950/944.

31. Higginbotham, "Sin of the Age," 330.

32. Damme, "Infanticide," 16.

33. See, for example, D. Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (Durham NC, 2004); and A. Rao and S. Pierce, "Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, and Colonial Rule," Interventions 3, no. 2 (2001): 159-68.

34. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 264-68. For most people, the three stages presented separate stages in their life. Some men and women, however, moved back and forth from one type of relationship to another or stayed within one relationship all their life.

35. For a summary of contemporary ideas about the family formation pattern, see B. L. Moore and M. A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920 (Mona, West Indies, 2004), chap. 4. For a summary of scholarly interpretations of the pattern, see R. T. Smith, "The Caribbean Family: Continuity and Transformation," in General History of the Caribbean: The Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, ed. B. Brereton (London/Oxford, 2004), 506-36.

36. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 288.

37. Some 26,400 women changed parishes between 1871 and 1921. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 149. On the rural distress, which stemmed largely from the decline of the sugar industry, see Eisner, Jamaica 1830-1930, chaps. 11 and 15.

38. E. Brodber, The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907-1944 (Gainesville, FL, 2004), 101; E. Clarke, My Mother who Fathered Me: A Study of the Families in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica [1957] (Mona, West Indies, 1999), 67; and E. Price, Bananaland: Pages from the Chronicle of an English Minister in Jamaica (London, 1930), 51.

39. On the sexual challenges and threats faced by young female domestics, see, for instance, the statement of Edith Clarke, chairman of the Board of Supervision, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925.

40. "The Salvation Army's Work," Daily Gleaner, 9 December 1905; "Annual Report of the YWCA for 1928-29," Daily Gleaner, 15 April 1929; and Questionnaire on Certain Matters connected with Social Welfare, CO950//944.

41. Daily Gleaner, 2 June 1932.

42. On the metropolitan debate about infanticide, see Higginbotham, "Sin of the Age"; A. Hunt, "Calculations and Concealments: Infanticide in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain," Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 71-94; C. L. Krueger, "Literary Defences and Medical Prosecutions: Representing Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Britain," Victorian Studies 40 (1997): 271-94; Marland, "Getting Away with Murder?" and L. Rose, The Massacre of the Innocent: Infanticide in Britain, 1800-1939 (London, 1986). The similarities between the debate in the Gleaner and the metropolitan debate is not surprising, as the editors and the letter writers were born in England or of English-descent.

43. "The Woman, the Jurors, the Judge and the Governor," Daily Gleaner, 28 November 1906.

44. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.

45. Following the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, an elected Assembly was replaced by a Legislative Council made up of twelve men nominated by the governor. In 1884, an elected element was added to the Legislative Council.

46. "The Maintenance of Illegitimate Children," Daily Gleaner, 7 June 1926.

47. "Rev. Henry Clarke and the Knapp Case," Daily Gleaner, 2 July 1905. Emphasis mine. See also Clarke's letter to the editor Daily Gleaner, 31 October 1924 and Mrs W. E. Wilson's letter to the editor, Daily Gleaner, 3 November 1924.

48. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.

49. Daily Gleaner, 23 April 1897.

50. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.

51. "The Woman, the Jurors, the Judge and the Governor," Daily Gleaner, 28 November 1906.

52. "Expectant Mothers May Not Receive Death Sentence," Daily Gleaner, 20 February 1935.

53. Ward, "Legislating for Human Nature," 264 and 268; and Damme, "Infanticide," 15. In 1938, the term "newly born" was replaced by "a baby under one year old." This amendment accepted, in other words, what is now called "postnatal depression" as a defence in infanticide cases.

54. Ward, "Legislating for Human Nature," 257.

55. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.

56. From the European encounter with Africans in the fifteenth century until the very present, sexual behaviour has been an important marker of racial difference, especially that of women. See E. B. Higginbotham, "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251-74. On the process by which marriage was naturalised and idealised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see J. R. Gillis; es, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages 1600-to the Present (Oxford, 1985).

57. Daily Gleaner, 31 January 1905. See also Daily Gleaner, 6 June 1912.

58. Daily Gleaner, 17 September 1930.

59. Daily Gleaner, 23 February 1927.

60. Daily Gleaner, 17 August 1918.

61. African Jamaican women were not the only ones who adopted this strategy in the courtroom. See, for instance, Ruggiero, "Honor, Maternity, and the Disciplining of Women"; and Donovan, "Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913."

62. Daily Gleaner, 13 June 1918. Only Daniel was charged with and found guilty of murder. For other child murder cases committed with the help or at the direction of family members, see Daily Gleaner, 12 May 1906, 12 November 1915, 24 May 1924, and 13 July 1938.

63. Daily Gleaner, 10 June 1927.

64. See, for instance, Daily Gleaner, 22 February 1906, 27 August 1908, and 15 January 1924.

65. Daily Gleaner, 6 June 1912.

66. M. Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica (Liverpool, 1952), 44.

67. Daily Gleaner, 17 August 1918 and 2 June 1932.

68. CO 950/234.

69. Daily Gleaner, 12 May 1906 and 27 June 1906.

70. Daily Gleaner, 4 May 1926.

71. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 321.

72. Daily Gleaner, 28 September 1932.

73. R. A. Lobdell, "Women in the Jamaican Labour Force, 1881-1921," Social and Economic Studies 37, nos. 1-2 (1988): 213.

74. Questionnaire on Certain Matters Connected with Social Welfare, CO 950/944.

75. Daily Gleaner, 15 February 1908.

76. Daily Gleaner, 22 January 1918.

77. See, for instance, the statement of Roslyn Gordon in the Daily Gleaner, 12 November 1915.

78. Daily Gleaner, 16 October 1924.

79. Questionnaire on Certain Matters Connected with Social welfare, CO 950/944.

80. Statement by Edith Clarke, chairman of the Board of Supervision, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925.

81. Daily Gleaner, 23 April 1897.

82. Daily Gleaner, 23 April 1897. As the jury concluded that Ethel was not "responsible according to law when she did the act," the judge declared that she should be "kept in custody as a criminal lunatic at the Lunatic Asylum until the Governor's pleasure." Ethel was soon pardoned by the governor. In 1902, however, she was again charged with murdering a newborn infant. See, Daily Gleaner, 13 October 1902. This confirms the recent contention that women with previous episodes of psychosis during the delivery run a high risk for recurrence after another birth. See, for instance, K. L. Wisne et all., "Postpartum Disorders," in Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers who Kill, ed. M. G. Spinelli (Washington D.C and London, 2003), 54.

83. Daily Gleaner, 13 January 1924.

84. Daily Gleaner, 17 September 1930.

85. Daily Gleaner, 28 September 1932. For similar remarks, see Daily Gleaner, 13 October 1902 and 13 October 1926.

86. Daily Gleaner, 28 September 1932.

87. See, for example, Mathilda Johnson, who had lived in the yard for six years but had not asked her neighbours for help. Daily Gleaner, 29 January 1915. On social isolation as a risk factor for child murder, see L. J. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," in Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers who Kill, ed. M. G. Spinelli (Washington D.C and London, 2003), 93.

88. Daily Gleaner, 30 June 1905. See, also Daily Gleaner 7 October 1908 and 16 August 1924.

89. M. Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill, 1924), 62. For a similar explanation, see Memorandum on Old Age Pensions, CO 950/945.

90. Kerr, Personality and Conflict, 25

91. E. Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me, 66. Although this study was conducted in the late 1950s, the similarities between Clarke's findings and those of earlier anthropologists and the slow pace of change in rural Jamaica suggest that the norm of motherhood set out in her study was not markedly different from that after the turn of the century.

92. Kerr, Personality and Conflict, chaps 4 and 6.

93. M.Gaunt, Reflection in Jamaica (London, 1932), 64.

94. The elite and lower-class African Jamaicans, however, did not define these motherly duties in the same way and they also attached a different weight to them. See, my "Imagining Womanhood."

95. E. Brodber, "Afro-Jamaican Women at the Turn of the Century," Social and Economic Studies 35, no. 3 (1986): 25-26.

96. L. Mathurin Mair, "The Arrival of Black Women," Jamaica Journal 9, nos. 2-3 (1975): 5.

97. These measures were triggered by the threat of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. For other measures adopted to increase slave fertility. See, B. Bush-Slimani, "Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies," History Workshop Journal 36 (1993): 86-87.

98. On the various obstacles to mothering on the slave plantations, see my Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition (New York, 2007), chaps. 1-2.

99. Daily Gleaner, 30 August 1924. See also Daily Gleaner, 30 June 1905 and 27 January 1921.

100. Daily Gleaner, 19 April 1930.

101. Daily Gleaner, 31 January 1905 and 27 August 1908.

102. Daily Gleaner, 22 February 1906. For similar accounts, see Daily Gleaner, 5 June 1909 and 29 January 1915.

103. Daily Gleaner, 4 January 1906.

104. Daily Gleaner, 27 August 1908. Emphasis mine.

105. "The Woman, the Jurors, the Judge and the Governor," Daily Gleaner, 28 November 1906.

106. Daily Gleaner, 23 May 1919 and 27 January 1921.

107. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 41.

108. Daily Gleaner, 9 and 16 October 1924.

109. Daily Gleaner, 1 November 1930. See also, Daily Gleaner, 4 January 1906, 12 May 1906, 27 June 1906, p. 66, 7 October 1908, 9 February 1910, 31 December 1914 and 12 June 1919.

110. See, for instance, Daily Gleaner, 30 march 1917, 20 June 1923, 6 November 1923, and 23 February 1927.

111. Daily Gleaner, 20 June 1923.

112. Daily Gleaner, 29 January 1915. For a similar case, see Daily Gleaner, 10 July 1907.

113. Daily Gleaner, 2 June 1932. See, also the statements of Arabella Livermore and Pauline Hewitt in the Daily Gleaner, 29 August 1903 and 28 September 1932.

114. See, for instance, Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 101.

115. The first birth control clinic in metropolitan society was set up in 1921 by Mary Stopes. By the 1930s, information on contraception was also provided by child and welfare centres. A. McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford, 1999), 68 and 81-82.

116. On the use of herbal means of contraception during slavery, see Bush-Slimani, "Hard Labour," 91-93.

117. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 47.

118. Statements of May Farquharson and Edith Clarke before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/234 and 925. For more on the birth control campaign, see J. B. Mcleary, "Amy Beckford Bailey: A Biography," The Jamaican Historical Review 18 (1993): 31-39.

119. Daily Gleaner, 27 November 1930. On the use of natural abortifacients, see, Daily Gleaner, 5 May 1926; Gaunt, Reflection in Jamaica, 255; and Beckwith, Black Roadways, 55.

120. P. E. Bryan, Philanthropy and Social Welfare in Jamaica (Mona, West Indies, 1990), 38.

121. On these attitudes, which still exist today, see M. Hodge, "We Kind of Family," in Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought, ed. P. Mohammed (Mona, West Indies, 2002): 474-85; and C. Sargent and M. Harris, "Gender Ideology, Childrearing, and Child Health in Jamaica," American Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (1992): 523-37.

122. See, for instance, Meyer, Mothers Who Kill, 43.

123. On creches in metropolitan society, see J. E. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900-1939 (London, 1980), 80.

124. "Child Saving League Formed," Daily Gleaner, 17 November 1916; "Second Annual Meeting of the Child Saving League," Daily Gleaner, 21 December 1918; and Questionnaire on Certain Matters Connected with Social Welfare, CO 950/944.

125. Statement by Dr. T. J. Hallinan, director of the medical services, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925; and A. McCaw-Binns, "Safe Motherhood in Jamaica: From Slavery to Self-Determination," Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, 19 (2005), 255. From 1919 onwards, midwives could only be registered to practise if they had sat a qualifying examination. A large proportion of the 900 registered midwives no longer practised or practised only sporadically.

126. Statement by Dr. T. J. Hallinan before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925; Statement of Dr. Anderson, the Mayor of Kingston, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/926; and McCaw-Binns, "Safe Motherhood," 255. From 1937 onwards, women who could not pay the fee were admitted if they had a ticket for medical care. As there were only 1,200 ticket-distributors in the island, each of whom had the right to refuse a ticket, it was not always easy for poor women to get access to the Kingston maternity hospital.

127. For an insight into the work of a midwife employed by the parochial board, see the statement of midwife Julia Elison, Daily Gleaner, 19 April 1930.

128. "Child Welfare Association Hold Twentieth Annual General Meeting", Daily Gleaner, 22 June 1936; Bryan, Philanthropy and Social Welfare, 39; and McCaw-Binns, "Safe Motherhood," 256. Only the CWA received some government support for its services. A lack of funds explains to a large extent why the government did not set up a comprehensive system of child and maternal welfare. The West India Royal Commission, which investigated the causes of the 1938 labour riots, emphasised the poor provision of child and maternal welfare and recommended that the colonial government set up a machinery and administrative organisation through which child and maternal welfare policies and programmes could be developed and put into effect. This recommendation was taken up after the Second World War. See West India Royal Commission Report (London, 1945), chap. 11.

129. "Mrs. Knibb Defends Her Evidence before Commission Admonishes Mrs. DeCor-dova," to the editor, Plain Talk, 26 November 1938. Middle-class African Jamaican women were involved in various voluntary organisations, especially those that catered for women and children. The discrimination that they experienced in these organisations (e.g. African Jamaican women were seldom elected onto the executive) led some African Jamaican women to set up their own organisations. In 1938, for instance, Morris-Knibb along with Una Marson and Amy Bailey set up the Save the Children Fund. For more on the attitudes of middle-class African Jamaican women towards their lower-class sisters, see my "Misfortune of Being Black."

130. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 187; and R. Floud, The People and the British Economy, 1830-1914 (Oxford/New York, 1997), 50.

131. Daily Gleaner, 10 June 1927. Active strategies are behavioural or psychological responses designed to change the nature of the anxieties and/or the perceptions held about them. Avoidant strategies, on the other hand, lead people into activities or mental states that keep them from directly addressing the stressful situation. http://www.earch/Psychological/notebook/coping.html

132. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 83.

133. Daily Gleaner, 9 January 1915.

134. Daily Gleaner, 15 January 1924. Neurohormonal factors prevent in these instances of pregnancy denial the onset of many pregnancy symptoms, while symptoms of pregnancy that are experienced, such as the movement of the fetus, are usually attributed to other factors, such as an upset stomach. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 84.

135. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 93-94; and Meyer, Mothers who Kill, chap. 2.

136. Daily Gleaner, 4 July 1930.

137. Daily Gleaner, 7 July 1911.

138. M. G. Spinelli, "Neonaticide: A Systematic Investigation of 17 Cases," in Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers Who Kill, ed. M. G. Spinelli (Washington D.C. and London, 2003): 110.

139. A notable exception is Michelle Oberman's, "Understanding Infanticide in Context," which includes societal ideas about good mothering.

140. This did not mean, however, that it bestowed the same rights and duties on a couple as Anglican marriage in metropolitan society. A slave couple, for instance, could at any time be separated by their planter, and a husband or wife could not prevent the other from leaving the relationship.

141. Between 1808 and 1922, the Anglican Church performed 3,600 marriages on a slave population of 330,000. Nonconformist missionaries performed far more marriages. The Moravians, for example, performed 189 marriages on three of their stations between 1827 and 1834. Parliamentary Papers, 1823, vol. xciii, 320-21; and B. W. Higman, Slave Populations in the Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 116. Pressure from the Imperial government and abolitionists led the Jamaican legislature to amend the marriage clause in the Slave Law in 1826. As it did away with the marriage fee but firmly kept in place written permission, the amendment did little to increase Anglican slave marriage. For more on slave marriage, see my Representations of Slave Women, chap. 4.

142. See, for instance, G. W. Roberts and S. A. Sinclair, Women in Jamaica: Patterns of Reproduction and Family (Millwood, 1978), chap. 1; and Smith, "The Caribbean Family," 527.

143. On the glorification of motherhood in metropolitan society in the aftermath of the Boer War, see, for instance, A. Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop Journal 5 (1978): 8-65; and J. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900-1939 (London, 1980).

By Henrice Altink

University of York