Infanticide and Abandonment in the Industrial Metropolis: Gender, Reproduction and Capitalism in Chicago, 1870–1911

Abstract

This article uses an unprecedentedly extensive data set of 1,270 suspicious infant death investigations from Cook County to measure the incidence of infanticide. We contextualize this data with quantitative evidence on abandonment in Chicago, newspaper coverage, and judicial cases. We argue that over the long run, a changing occupational structure, with wage-earning women leaving domestic service and entering clerical work, was crucial in decreasing both infanticide and abandonment. From being a prominent part of fertility control for poor women in the 1870s, by the 1910s infanticide and abandonment had become rare. However, in the short term, inflation increased the incidence of both infanticide and abandonment from 1904 to 1908. We argue that agency at the most intimate levels must be understood within broader structures. Bourgeois proprietors ran households that employed an extensive staff of domestic servants for cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and for facilitating visiting among elite families. With the rise of new kind of capitalist elite alongside the rise of the corporation, servants and urban networks of visiting were no longer central to elite social reproduction by the early twentieth century. The reconstruction of capitalism transformed work within homes and firms, thereby mitigating the conditions that made infanticide common in the nineteenth century.