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

Motherhood, respectability, and baby farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explored a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities. 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 Civilization. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent baby farming, a significant artefact of Western modernizing society. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history that reveals all that was associated with baby farming to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time.

Format: Hardback
Length: 148 pages
Publication date: 10 November 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Motherhood, respectability, and baby farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explore 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 women's 'dirty work' when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilization. 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 civilization arguably mattered most, the 'right kind of parenthood - especially motherhood - became paramount. As the 'wrong offspring could jeopardize 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 newborn 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 commercialized 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 that 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 scholars of gender, history, and society, as well as those who are interested in the broader implications of modernising ideologies and practices on women's lives. It offers a fresh perspective on an often-overlooked aspect of Victorian and Edwardian history, and challenges traditional narratives that portray women as passive victims of social and cultural forces. By exploring the complexities of motherhood, respectability, and baby farming, this book provides valuable insights into the ways in which women negotiated the challenges of their time and shaped the course of history.

Weight: 460g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367752750