Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of womens dirty work, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: baby-farming. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the right kind of parenthood especially motherhood became paramount. As the wrong offspring could jeopardise a womans chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a womans respectability could be disposed of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and infanticide for hire. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming including all possible outcomes to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the periods civilising offensive. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.