Daniel J. R. Grey

‘Liable to Very Gross Abuse’: Murder, Moral Panic and Cultural Fears over Infant Life Insurance, 1875–1914

The belief that infant life insurance policies provided working-class parents with a direct incentive for the deliberate starvation and neglect of their children was widespread in late nineteenth-century Britain. Newspapers, medical periodicals and the newly formed National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) regularly claimed that, though almost impossible to prove, cases of lethal child abuse were endemic across the United Kingdom. These anxieties appear to have reached their zenith in the 1880s and 1890s, yet despite the regular (albeit not unchallenged) repetition of this claim in the press and before Parliament, actual cases of child homicide where it was alleged that infant life insurance had been the motivation for the crime seem to have been few and far between. Nor did critics of the practice ever succeed in banning it outright. By 1908 politicians felt able to assert that this idea was utterly without foundation, and the once persistently repeated rhetoric of malevolent wor...

‘Almost Unknown Amongst the Jews’: Jewish Women and Infanticide in London 1890–1918

Abstract This paper is the first work to explore the cases of the small number of identifiable Jewish women tried for infanticide at the Central Criminal Court between 1890 and 1918. Although the Jewish population of London (and indeed Britain) was facing increasing anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cases discussed here were treated with equivalent leniency to those of other women charged with newborn child murder and concealment of birth in this period. Despite the very different circumstances of each case, the defendants were able to fit the story of their crime into a highly recognizable script that dovetailed neatly with the dominant discourse of ‘the infanticidal’ shared by both popular and elite British society. In examining these trials, a forgotten aspect of Jewish metropolitan life is revealed, and new light is thrown on the complicated way in which ethnicity might — or might not — play out in criminal justice proceedings.

‘Agonised Weeping’: Representing Femininity, Emotion and Infanticide in Edwardian Newspapers

Newspaper reports of actual or suspected infanticide were by no means unusual in early twentieth-century England, yet few of these ever resulted in conviction on the capital charge. This article traces the ways in which both local and national newspapers reported on one of the rare cases which a woman was sentenced to death for the murder of her baby: the 1909 trial of Alice Cleaver at the Central Criminal Court. Despite clear evidence of her guilt, newspapers focused instead on the ways in which the defendant had conformed to ideas about respectable femininity, and were united in depicting Cleaver as deserving of judicial and public sympathy. Comparing press reports of the trial with unpublished Home Office papers also reveals the deliberate silence of the press on matters which conflicted with the ‘standard’ representation of infanticide cases—including the fact that Cleaver had a learning disability.

‘The Agony of Despair’: Pain and the Cultural Script of Infanticide in England and Wales, 1860–1960

Pain — both physical and emotional — was central to the cultural script of infanticide in England and Wales between 1860 and 1960. Despite Elaine Scarry’s famous suggestion that ‘Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability’,1 recent scholarship has emphasised that pain is indeed both ‘shareable’ through visual, textual and oral means, and that it is assigned historically and culturally specific meanings by those who witness and experience it.2 By ‘cultural script’, in this instance, I refer to a commonly accepted set of assumptions about what it meant to be ‘infanticidal’ between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, beliefs that were shared by a diverse cohort of English and Welsh men and women. This included, but was not confined to, politicians from across the political spectrum, doctors, lawyers and social scientists. It was generally understood that the ‘typical’ infanticide defendant was a young woman who had been perceived as virtuous and hard-working prior to the crime, was then seduced and abandoned by a feckless or malicious man under false promises of marriage and ‘respectable motherhood’, and was left facing economic and reputational ruin if her condition were discovered. The more closely a woman could ‘fit’ the story of her individual circumstances into this narrative, the more likely it was that a judge and jury would view her sympathetically.3

‘What woman is safe…?’: coerced medical examinations, suspected infanticide, and the response of the women's movement in Britain, 1871–1881

Few scholars have investigated infanticide in modern Britain. Still less work has explored the connection between feminist analyses of this issue during the 1870s—a time when child homicide was perceived as endemic—and its relationship to other, more well-known campaigns by the womens movement that also focused on the double standard of sexual morality as embodied by law. This article re-evaluates the response to judicial treatment of infanticide issued by the feminist-led Committee for Amending the Law in Points Wherein it is Injurious to Women (CALPIW) and the Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights (VADPR). It argues that until a VADPR-sponsored civil damages case was defeated at the Court of Appeal in 1881, the feminist critique held the possibility of radically reshaping womens medico-legal treatment in England and Wales. Its ultimate failure, moreover, explains the surprising absence of infanticide as a specific campaign issue for the British womens movement from the 1880s until shortly before the First World War.

‘She Gets the Taunts and Bears the Blame’: Infertility in Contemporary India

This chapter provides a preliminary survey of infertility and its social context in present-day India. It aims to demonstrate and foreground the historical aspects of this issue, which are essential in order to understand how and why the Indian fertility industry has developed in the ways it has done, and why infertility remains in many respects a taboo subject. Drawing on English-language Indian newspapers, government reports, film, and literature, Grey shows how present-day attitudes and practices have their roots in policies and ideas originally generated during the late twentieth century. He explores the demographic context and population policies of India; reproductive medicine, adoption, and surrogacy; the social and cultural context of infertility; and religion. The chapter reveals how the profound stigmatization of infertility in contemporary India disproportionately affects women, regardless of faith, caste, region, or class background.

Parenting, Infanticide and the State in England and Wales, 1870–1950

In January 1886, Alice Jackson, a teenaged domestic servant, gave birth at her employer’s farm near Radnor to a baby girl, also called Alice.1 Three weeks later, the baby was thriving and Jackson was told that she needed to go to her father’s a few miles away, having been lent a number of baby clothes and told by Diana Pritchard, her employer’s wife, ‘to come back any time she liked if she had not welcome at her father’s house’.2 The following day, Jackson returned to the farm with some of the clothes but without the child, claiming the baby had died suddenly on the way to her father’s cottage and that the body had been taken by its father and paternal grandmother for burial. When she tried to simultaneously register the girl’s birth and death on 15 February with the Radnor registrar, Albert Shewell, however, he was immediately suspicious ‘because she had no medical certificate, and her answers to my questions were not satisfactory to me’.3 Not least of these for Shewell was the question of how it would have been possible for Jackson to have already arranged for the burial of her daughter without holding an appropriate certificate from the registrar, since this would have been illegal. Shortly afterwards, Jackson secretly fled the town, and was arrested while trying to get to Cardiff.4

Rethinking Gender and Justice in South Asia, 1772–2013

Amartya Sen has compellingly argued in The Idea of Justice that far from being a value-neutral term, ‘justice’ is a relative one, with competing claims made on it by different parties in any given context.1 Does this mean that justice is an empty concept, bereft of any meaning or devoid of self-explanatory power? This special issue seeks to find answers to this question. ‘Justice’ came to embrace myriad meanings for the British Empire. Enlightenment thinking that hinged on rationality and logic, discarding superstition and religion, provided a platform for the discussion of rights and justice for the new generations of philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and James S. Mill.2 The debates that spilled over from such a legacy on collective versus individual rights can be seen unfolding in various discourses from missionaries, indigenous legal thinkers, reformers down to artists, novelists and British officials on the ground in the wider British empire from across India, Burma and Malaysia. So influential was the idea of justice in the template of the ‘civilising mission’ that despite the religious and theological framework of missionary thinking on the idea of ‘mercy’ and ‘justice’, one notices from this collection of essays that missionaries and their African and Asian converts drew more from Enlightenment thought and the Gospels rather than the Old Testament in the new phenomenon called ‘mission Christianity’.3 Concerns with ‘justice’ and what this might entail for South Asia in the sense of delivering ‘fairness and equitable treatment’, goes beyond a focus on the narrow legalistic sense of the term, yet simultaneously returns to the ideas and practices of law. These processes are also deeply bound up with both the materiality and representation of gender, as evidenced by the national and international responses that were generated by the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in New Delhi on 16 December 2012.4 For Indian women and men who publicly protested, the raped student (Nirbhaya) became a rallying cry in not just bringing the specific perpetrators to account, but to highlight broader issues of injustice facing women, such as restrictions (in practice if not necessarily in theory) on mobility, education and dress.5 Alongside the issues of discrimination and injustice, the subject of South Asian women’s social, cultural, religious and economic position has also historically been identified both within and outside the subcontinent as an area particularly deserving of attention. In practice, however, the ways in which inequality around gender and sexuality has been theorised and articulated in both colonial and postcolonial South Asia has been highly variable. On the one hand, it has led to thriving feminist movements, and on the other, notions of ‘eternally oppressed South Asian women’ have been – and are still – used as a pretext to justify a plethora of conservative viewpoints about this region, both at home and abroad.

Importing Gendered Legal Reasoning from England: Wife-Murders in Early Colonial India, 1805-1857

Abstract The informal criminal defence in India of ‘injured masculine honour’ was steadily narrowed over the course of the nineteenth century. Yet this remained a popular – and extremely effective – appeal to the judiciary. This article argues that such regular and successful appeals by husbands in India are best understood by examining how lethal domestic violence was represented in England, and how this cultural baggage was transferred to Indian courts as a central part of the new ‘Anglo-Muhammadan’ criminal law. Such gendered legal ideas, as I demonstrate here, seriously limited the chances that wife-killers in colonial India would be brought to justice.

Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975). By Mallarika Sinha Roy

(2014). Gender and Radical Politics in India: Magic Moments of Naxalbari (1967–1975). By Mallarika Sinha Roy. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 136-137.