Disciplining the Bodies of Single Women

Starting in 1802, the Napoleonic government promoted the education of enlightened midwives through both the Parisian Maternité and departmental schools. The Gers, in the southwest, repeatedly tried and failed to open a school that would graduate well-trained midwives. Its failure by 1839 rested on the male authorities' inability to conceive of and support spaces where three interrelated groups of women could cohabitate safely in this rural and Catholic department. Young, innocent midwifery students needed protection from the mostly unwed mothers available as bodies for practice. In turn, both the unwed mothers and the midwifery students, due to their knowledge of procreation, threatened the purity of the nursing sisters who controlled charitable spaces. Ultimately, despite attempts to redefine the bodies of unwed mothers and reconfigure the spaces to run a legitimate school, the authorities abandoned the goal of providing skilled midwives for the women in labor who needed them most. A partir de 1802, le gouvernement napoléonien a promu la formation de sages-femmes à travers l’école de la Maternité à Paris et des écoles départementales. Le Gers a essayé à plusieurs reprises, mais en vain, d'ouvrir une école qui formerait des sages-femmes diplômées. Son échec repose sur l'incapacité des autorités masculines de ce département rural et catholique à concevoir la coopération et la cohabitation de trois groupes de femmes : les étudiantes sages-femmes, les religieuses, et les filles-mères. Les étudiantes sages-femmes—jeunes, innocentes, et célibataires—avaient besoin de protection contre la contamination morale des filles-mères dont les corps étaient nécessaires pour l'instruction. A leur tour, les filles-mères et les étudiantes, en raison de leur connaissance de la procréation, menaçaient la pureté des sœurs infirmières qui contrôlaient les hospices. En fin de compte, malgré les tentatives de redéfinir le corps des mères célibataires et de réaménager les hospices pour créer une école légitime, les autorités ont fini par abandonner l'objectif de former des sages-femmes diplômées pour servir les femmes en couches qui en avaient le plus besoin.

Epilogue

Much has happened in the history of welfare since 1850. The epilogue surveys these events, highlighting when they mark changes or continuities with the themes in the five chapters. Some innovations, such as increased involvement of state and federal governments in poor relief, were real changes in how poor relief was financed and governed. Other aspects of recent welfare will sound familiar to readers of the five chapters: debates over how to give humane, fair, and yet inexpensive aid, or efforts at governing families and unwed mothers. We still debate how welfare is best provided, and we do the important work of helping those in need. Knowing the ideas of those who debated welfare in the past, along with those who experienced it and those who made it happen, can give us perspective and courage for the work that still needs to be done.

Hard-Working Single Mother

Poor law officials had tremendous authority over families, children, and unwed mothers. Lydia Bates was separated from her own parents as a child, when they became too poor to support her. Overseers of the poor in her small town moved her to other families’ houses. As she grew older, overseers likely treated Bates like an unpaid temporary worker. She lived, temporarily, in houses where her work could help the houseowners, including an elderly couple who might have needed poor relief without Bates’s help. When Bates became pregnant with baby Rhoda, overseers became even more involved. They used the court system to hold Rhoda’s father financially responsible. They also had the authority to decide whether Rhoda could remain with her mother or, like her mother, would have to live in neighbors’ homes. This chapter focuses on how poor laws governed sexuality and families.

Ehe, Familie und Verwandtschaft. Beziehungen in sozialen, ökonomischen und rechtlichen Kontexten

rriage, Family, and Kinship. Social, Economic, and Legal Contexts. This article focuses on the fundamental aspects of marriage, family, and kin relationships in nineteenth-century Lower Austria with an emphasis on rural areas. The range of topics includes household formations and forms of matchmaking, conditions for starting a family, marriage restrictions and marriage prohibitions, the presence of kin, relationships between the genders and generations in interaction with marital property regimes and inheritance practices, remarriage, unwed mothers, and the ever-present potential for conflict. One of the aims is to ascertain how marriage, family, and kin were interconnected with the governmental-administrative power structures, and to what extent the existing legal framework helped shape the options available to men and women. Continuity and change often overlapped – we see this in the manorial system lasting until 1848 or the continued institution of joint marital property, which strengthened the position of wives and widows beyond the standard dictated by the provisions of the Austrian General Civil Code of 1811.

Conclusion

The outcomes for women tried for homicide as well as the types of homicides they were accused of changed dramatically over the centuries. Overall women grew less likely to be convicted of murder, and those convicted of murder, far less likely to be executed. Women were also more often found insane. But analysis of different categories reveals that changes in the treatment of neonaticides as well as an enormous increase in the rate at which women were prosecuted for killing their own children accounted for the most dramatic changes in verdicts. By the early twentieth century, prosecutions in both categories were beginning to decline as the amount of support increased and unwed mothers were viewed more sympathetically. But increased concern for the survival of children had led to more prosecutions and harsher sentences for caregivers accused in the deaths of their charges. The number of women prosecuted for killing non-related adults fell. Women accused of non-domestic homicides were usually seen as having been unduly influenced by men. The few women who committed murder on their own were viewed as monsters. Spousal homicide was the category in which the prosecution rate showed the least fluctuation. The outcomes for women convicted of killing their husbands changed dramatically but this category seems particularly resistant to outside influence. It seems likely that prosecution rates fluctuated more than actual homicide rates and some of the stereotypes regarding women and lethal violence seem to reflect real differences between men and women as opposed to gender constructs.

1834–1873: Becoming Women and Ogresses

In the Victorian period, the urge to match women accused of homicide to stereotypes grew stronger. This was a challenge, since at the same time the number of women tried for killing their own children was skyrocketing. Motherhood was the essential aspect of womanhood, yet the expectations seemed to be driving women to madness. The New Poor Law meant that deaths of children from neglect were being punished more severely while the injustice of the bastardy clause led to greater sympathy for unwed mothers who appeared in court. There was a huge increase in insanity verdicts. Women who killed someone other than their own child were often viewed through a prism created by fictional models as the press attempted to force the woman into an existing model.