‘A most diabolical deed’

Farrell, Elaine

doi:10.7765/9781526102232

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Research on violent women in an Irish context has particularly focused on the crime of infanticide. Scholarship by this author, Karen Brennan, James Kelly, Dympna McLoughlin and Cliona Rattigan has pointed to the ways that some women who murdered their children were treated by the criminal justice system (Brennan, 2013;Farrell, 2013;Kelly, 1992Kelly, , 2012Kelly, , 2019McLoughlin, 2002;Rattigan, 2012). Despite clear evidence in some cases that infants were violently and deliberately killed rather than passively allowed to die, women accused of infant murder, from the mid-nineteenth century at least, typically elicited sympathy.…”

Section: Women and Violence In Nineteenth-and Early-twentieth-century...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Historians have mined these records for the light that they shed on individual cases, crimes, or regions (Curley, 1989;Farrell, 2013;Farrell, 2020;Fleming, 2012;Irwin, 1989;Lohan, 1989;Luddy and O'Dowd, 2020;Steiner-Scott, 1997;Vaughan, 2009). They recognise that the sources 'help enormously in the reconstruction of the type of life which led people to commit crimes (Curley, 1989, 82-3) and 'contain some remarkable life-stories (Vaughan, 2009: 307).…”

Section: Women's Voices In the Irish Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Voices of Violent Women in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Farrell¹

2023

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence

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This chapter focuses on women's descriptions of their own violence in nineteenth-century Ireland, as revealed in prisoner petitions held in the National Archives of Ireland. It privileges the case files of women imprisoned or sentenced to death for violent crimes, including infanticide, manslaughter, murder, wounding and assault. This chapter takes an empirical approach and considers the ways that women explained and rationalised their violent acts. An analysis of the petitions offers an insight into women's views of their own violence, gendered attitudes at the time, and women's sense of the factors that might lead to a commutation of sentence. The truthfulness of the petitions is not important in this study; instead, the chapter explores the self-image that women wanted to portray and the tactics that they opted to use to seek a reduction in their sentences. As shown in this chapter, most women emphasised their passivity: they typically claimed to be innocent, coerced or provoked into violence.

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Section: Women and Violence In Nineteenth-and Early-twentieth-century...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Women's Voices In the Irish Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Voices of Violent Women in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Farrell¹

2023

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence

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“…30 In Ireland, Farrell shows that the south-eastern counties that 'produced domestic servants for the capital' had the highest rates of infanticide, indicating that women likely returned from Dublin to deal with their unwanted pregnancies. 31 In part, the elevated rates of infanticide among domestic servants represents the vulnerability of these women to the sexual advances of men in their household of employment. 32 Many domestic servants who moved from the countryside to urban areas were isolated, and the 'lack of social networks meant that they had little recourse when faced with rape and mistreatment'.…”

Section: Practising Infanticide: the Women Who Killed Their Infantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infanticide and Abandonment in the Industrial Metropolis: Gender, Reproduction and Capitalism in Chicago, 1870–1911

Batzell¹,

Coffman²

2020

Gender & History

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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.

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“…3 These narratives invariably stress that the woman on trial was of previous "good character" and driven to the crime by events and 2 Because of the separate legal systems of Scotland and Ireland, and after 1922, of Northern Ireland, this chapter focuses specifically on the context of infanticide cases and their representation in England and Wales, rather than attempting a "four nations" approach to its treatment within the United Kingdom. To the best of my knowledge there is regrettably no study at present dedicated entirely to infanticide in Northern Ireland, but there are valuable discussions of infanticide cases in Scotland (Abrams 2002;Kilday 2021: 31-35 and 46-55;Marks and Kumar 1996;Siddons 2014) and Ireland (Brennan 2013(Brennan , 2018a(Brennan , 2018bFarrell 2013;Rattigan 2012) during the period covered here. 3 It should be noted that infanticide emphatically being singled out as a "special case" set aside from expected categories is not limited to the professions of law and medicine, or the press and judicial system, but can appear in potentially surprising forms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000

Grey¹

2023

The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence

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Infanticide stands out as a crime which, in England and Wales, has been marked for at least two hundred years by deep-rooted continuities in its representation and treatment by both the criminal justice system and the media, despite the massive political, economic, social, legislative, and cultural changes that occurred over this period. Particularly remarkable about this longstanding discourse is its routine emphasis that the guilty mother is also a victim of tragic circumstances that led to the crime and deserving of sympathetic treatment. It also invariably sets infanticide apart as a "special case" which does not necessarily fit with either medical or legal definitions of diminished criminal responsibility. Perhaps surprisingly, this framing of women who commit infanticide stresses not only their "normality" prior to the offence but also their "respectability", a sharp contrast to the sometimes overtly misogynistic representation of other types of women offenders. This chapter argues that it is above all "respectability" that profoundly shaped the cultural script relating to infanticide in England and Wales between 1800 and 2000, and that this continues to exert a powerful legacy on the relatively small number of cases that now come before the courts in the twenty-first century.

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‘A most diabolical deed’

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

The Voices of Violent Women in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

The Voices of Violent Women in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Infanticide and Abandonment in the Industrial Metropolis: Gender, Reproduction and Capitalism in Chicago, 1870–1911

‘A Hard-Working and Nice Person?’ Respectability, Femininity and Infanticide in England and Wales, 1800–2000

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