...This chapter uses criminal cases, legal codes, and newspaper coverage to track Mexicans’ changing attitudes toward the crime of infanticide from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. While rarely denounced during the colonial era, when those convicted of infanticide would...

...Examining infanticide cases in the United States from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, Proving Pregnancy documents how women – Black and white, enslaved and free – gradually lost control over reproduction to male medical and legal professionals. In the first...

...The introduction outlines the book’s argument, namely that contests over and transformations in who controlled knowledge of women’s bodies constituted an important part of the growth of the nation in the nineteenth-century United States. That argument explains the book’s focus on infanticide...

...This chapter examines how racial and gendered expectations of motherhood and women’s appropriate social conduct and behavior influenced the ways in which courts addressed infanticide across the United States during Reconstruction. While Black women’s civil rights undoubtedly expanded during...

..., employers and neighbors. Jaffary focuses on key topics including virginity, conception, contraception and abortion, infanticide, “monstrous” births, and obstetrical medicine. Her approach yields surprising insights into the emergence of modernity in Mexico. Over the course of the nineteenth century...

... like infanticide, yet asylum administrators increasingly chose to focus on female reproductive and sexual organs instead of the trauma that destabilized so many women. The asylum also promoted a racialized vision of healthy womanhood and motherhood that ignored the trauma of abuse, fostered dependency...

... captivity. These include the riverine landscape and pagan captors (verse 1), the compulsion to sing “songs of Zion” (verse 3), and infanticidal violence (verses 8-9). The question posed by verse 4 – “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” – may have been as relevant to the Christian Indians...

...Chapter Three moves to the Illinois Country (Upper Louisiana) in 1748 and explores the contentious relationship between two enslaved women: Marie-Jeanne, a pregnant woman of African descent accused of infanticide after going into labor, and Lisette, a young Indian girl. The chapter explores French...