This article uses an unprecedentedly extensive data set of 1,270 suspicious infant death investigations from Cook County to measure the incidence of infanticide. We contextualize this data with quantitative evidence on abandonment in Chicago, newspaper coverage, and judicial cases. We argue that over the long run, a changing occupational structure, with wage-earning women leaving domestic service and entering clerical work, was crucial in decreasing both infanticide and abandonment. From being a prominent part of fertility control for poor women in the 1870s, by the 1910s infanticide and abandonment had become rare. However, in the short term, inflation increased the incidence of both infanticide and abandonment from 1904 to 1908. We argue that agency at the most intimate levels must be understood within broader structures. Bourgeois proprietors ran households that employed an extensive staff of domestic servants for cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and for facilitating visiting among elite families. With the rise of new kind of capitalist elite alongside the rise of the corporation, servants and urban networks of visiting were no longer central to elite social reproduction by the early twentieth century. The reconstruction of capitalism transformed work within homes and firms, thereby mitigating the conditions that made infanticide common in the nineteenth century.
•Susan Porter Benson, Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).•Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).•Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2014).•Katherine Leonard Turner, How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century, California Studies in Food and Culture 48 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).•Karol K. Weaver, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880–2000 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).•Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
This article introduces the present Special Theme on the global reception and appropriation of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963). It aims to interrogate Thompson's legacy and potential vitality at a moment of renewed social and intellectual upheavals. It emphasizes the need for an interdisciplinary and global reflection on Thompson's work and impact for understanding how class, nation, and "the people" as subjects of historical inquiry have been repeatedly recast since the 1960s. Examining the course of Thompson's ideas in Japan and West Germany, South Africa and Argentina, as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, each of the following five articles in the Special Theme is situated in specific and different locations in the global historiographical matrix. Read as a whole, they show how national historiographies have been products of local processes of state and class formation on the one hand, and transnational transfers of intellectual and historiographical ideas, on the other. They highlight the remarkable ability of Thompsonian social history to inspire new lives in varying national contexts shaped by different formations of race, class, and state.
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