Altink, H. (2007) I did not want to face the shame of exposure: Gender ideologies and child murder in post-emancipation Jamaica. Journal of Social History, 41 (2). ISSN 1527-1897
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This article examines 125 court cases of infanticide and concealment of birth that were reported in a Jamaican newspaper between 1865 and 1938 and were mainly committed by lower-class women. Informed by recent medical, psychological and legal studies on child murder, it demonstrates that historians can gain a more complete understanding of child murder in the modern period if they pay attention not only to poverty and a stigma attached to illegitimacy but also to societal norms of mothering and psycho-social stress factors. And more particularly, it will show that in spite of attempts to bring them in line with the metropolitan ideal of a family of husband/breadwinner, wife/homemaker and legitimate children, most lower-class African Jamaicans continued to hold on to their own norms of family, sexuality and gender, which had been carried over from Africa and reinforced by plantation practices during slavery.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Academic Units: | The University of York > History (York) |
| Depositing User: | York RAE Import |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Apr 2009 11:28 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Apr 2009 11:28 |
| Status: | Published |
| Publisher: | Journal of Social History |
| URI: | http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/6878 |
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