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Motherhood, respectability & baby-farming in Victorian & Edwardian London

Title
Motherhood, respectability & baby-farming in Victorian & Edwardian London / Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett.
ISBN
1000642437
1000642445
1003161804
9781000642438
9781000642445
9781003161806
9780367752750
9780367752774
Publication
Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023.
Copyright Notice Date
©2023
Physical Description
1 online resource.
Local Notes
Access is available to the Yale community.
Notes
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on November 10, 2022).
Access and use
Access restricted by licensing agreement.
Biographical / Historical Note
Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett works at the University of Leicester and the Open University. His research interests are interdisciplinary with a special focus on historical criminology. This book is based on his PhD thesis.
Summary
"Motherhood, Respectability & Baby-Farming in Victorian & Edwardian London explores the 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 women's '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 artifact 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 woman's chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or new-born child who may have compromised a woman's 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 period's 'civilising offensive'. Motherhood, Respectability & Baby-Farming in Victorian & Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies"-- Provided by publisher.
Variant and related titles
Taylor & Francis. EBA 2024-2025.
Other formats
Print version: Stuart-Bennett, Joshua G. Motherhood, respectability & baby-farming in Victorian & Edwardian London Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022
Format
Books / Online
Language
English
Added to Catalog
August 07, 2024
Series
Routledge studies in crime and society
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Citation

Available from:

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