"I did not want to face the shame of exposure": Gender ideologies and child murder in post-emancipation Jamaica

Journal of Social History

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 355-387

  Altink, Henrice ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF YORK   (United Kingdom)

^b Department of History ^*  (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38849145738     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2008.0025     Document Type: Article

References (192)

1. Daily Gleaner, 10 December 1998.
2. Daily Gleaner, 17 April 1897. The rate of infanticide cases is derived from the Blue Books 1888-1914, a set of statistics compiled annually by the governor. The prosecuted cases mentioned in this source underestimate the extent of infanticide in the island because the mothers of many dead foundlings were never located and many cases of infanticide went undetected.
3. The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act in England made concealment of birth a separate crime which applied not just to the mother but to any person. Before the Act, a woman was only charged with concealment of birth if there was little or no evidence that she had killed her newborn infant. Jamaica adopted this law around the time that it made the registration of births compulsory (1881).
4. Daily Gleaner, 18 February 1901.
5. The term "child murder" is used here to refer to both infanticide and concealment of birth because many women who were accused of concealment had killed their child, either wilfully or by not taking prenatal care or obtaining medical assistance during the delivery. The terms "infanticide" and "concealment of birth" will be used to refer to each category separately. The newspaper accounts used the term "infanticide," although until 1935 the charge was "murder" and not "infanticide". Infanticide is commonly understood as the killing of a child under one year of age. This article, however, also examines some cases in which a woman was accused of killing an older child.
6. These dates are important watersheds in Jamaican history. The rebellion led to a Crown Colony government which embarked on various socio-economic reforms, while the island-wide riots of 1938 ate generally regarded as the first step towards independence.
7. Many accused women refrained from giving a statement, such as Lilian Greaves, who told the judge that she did not "desire to say anything or to call any witnesses." Daily Gleaner, 16 August 1924.
8. Whites constituted less than three per cent of the total population during the period 1865-1938.
9. On this construction of motherhood, see, for instance, E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London, 1976), chap. 5;
10. L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 [1987] (London, 1992), chaps 3 and 7;
11. R . Perry, "Colonizing the Breast: Sexuality and Maternity in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no, 2 (1991): 203-34;
12. and T. Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1;680-1760 (Cambridge, UK, 1996), 2.5-28.
13. On the shift from active to passive female sexuality, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 401-03;
14. L. Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1988), 33-34;
15. and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility : Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), 325-47 and 366-73.
16. Starting with Adrienne Rich in her Of Woman Born (1976), various feminist scholars have argued that motherhood is not a biological given but a social construct that serves to sustain gender inequalities. Fot a summary of this body of work, see T. Arendell, "Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship," Journal of Marriage and the Family 62 (2000): 1192-1207. For more on the construction of women as asexual mothers,
17. see Perry, "Colonizing the Breast," and S. Weisskopf, "Maternal Sexuality and Asexual Motherhood," Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 766-82.
18. Before the publication of these histories, Jamaica's post-1865 history was mainly an economic and political history and it was often addressed as part of a larger historical survey. See, for instance, J. Carnegie, Some Aspects of Jamaica's Politics, 1918-1938 (Kingston, 1973);
19. G. Eisner, Jamaica 1830-1930: A Study of Economic Growth (London, 1963);
20. and G. W. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica (Cambridge, UK, 1957). Moore's and Johnson's history mentions some infanticide cases in order to illustrate childrearing patterns amongst lower-class African Jamaicans. It suggests that these and other cases may, as in the metropolitan society at the time, have been caused by poverty and a social stigma attached to illegitimacy.
21. See, for instance, P. Charles, "The Name of the Father: Women, Paternity, and British Rule in Nineteenth-Century Jamaica," International Labor and Working-Class History 41 (1992): 4-22;
22. H. Ford-Smith, "Making White Ladies: Race, Gender and the Production of Identity in Late Colonial-Jamaica," Resources for Feminist Research 23, no. 4 (1995-95): 55-67;
23. B. L. Moore and M. A. Johnson, "'Fallen Sisters'?: Attitudes to Female Prostitution in Jamaica at the Turn of the Twentieth Century," The Journal of Caribbean History 34, nos 1-2 (2000):46-70;
24. and R.Smith, Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race Masculinity and the Development of a National Consciousness (Manchester, 2004).
25. My work on gender in post-1865 Jamaica takes a different approach. It concentrates on ideas of womanhood within the African Jamaican community and explores their engagement with notions of class, race, gender and locality. See, for instance, "Respectability on Trial: Notions of Womanhood in Two Jamaican Trials in the Interwar Years," The Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers 4 (2003), at http://www.scsonline. freeserve.co.uk/olvol4.html;
26. " 'The Misfortune of being Black and Female': An Examination of Black Feminist Consciousness in Interwar Jamaica," Third Space 5, no. 2. (2006) at http://www.thirdspace.ca/vol5/;
27. and "Imagining Womanhood in Early Twentieth-Century Rural Afro-Jamaica," The Journal of Caribbean History 40, no. 1 (2006): 64-91.
28. Daily Gleaner, 24 May 1924.
29. J. Ranston, First Time Up: Lawyer Manley (Barbados, 1998), ix.
30. C. Meyer, Mothers Who Kill their Children: Inside the Minds of Moms from Susan Smith to the Prom Mom (New York, 2001), 13.
31. For some notable exceptions, see P. Anagol, "The Emergence of the Female Criminal in India: Infanticide and Survival under the Raj," History Workshop Journal 53 (2002): 73-93;
32. E. C. Green, "Infanticide and Infant Abandonment in the New South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865-1915," Journal of Family History 24, no. 2 (1999): 187-211;
33. M. Oberman, "Understanding Infanticide in Context: Mothers who Kill, 1870-1930 and Today", The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 92, nos. 3-4 (2003): 707-737;
34. K. Ruggiero, "Honor, Maternity, and the Disciplining of Women: Infanticide in Late Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires," The Hispanic American Historical Review 72, no. 3 ( 1992): 353-373;
35. P. Scully, "Narratives of Infanticide in the Aftermath of Slave Emancipation in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa," Canadian Journal of African Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 88-105;
36. and K. H. Wheeler, "Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Ohio," Journal of Social History 31, Winter, (1997): 407-418.
37. J. M. Donovan, "Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913," Journal of Family History 16, no. 2 (1991): 159-162.
38. On the definition of infanticide as a separate and non-capital offence, see C. Damme, "Infanticide: The Worth of an Infant under Law," Medical History 22(1978): 1-24;
39. Donovan, "Infanticide and the Juries in France," 157-176;
40. H. Marland, "Getting Away with Murder?: Puerperal Insanity, Infanticide and the Defence Plea," in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000, ed. M. Jackson (London, 2002): 168-192;
41. J. S. Richter, "Infanticide, Child Abandonment and Abortion in Imperial Germany," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28, no. 4 (1998): 511-51;
42. and T. Ward, "Legislating for Human Nature: Legal Responses to Infanticide, 1860-1938," in Infanticide: Historical Perspectives on Child Murder and Concealment, 1550-2000, ed. M. Jackson (London, 2002): 249-270.
43. In addition to the works mentioned in note 20, the following also provide a profile of women who committed child murder and single out poverty and the social stigma attached to illegitimacy as the main motivating factors: D. I. Kerzer, "Gender Ideology and Infant Abandonment in Nineteenth-century Italy," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 1 (1991): 1-25;
44. R. Sauer, "Infanticide and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century Britain," Population Studies 32, no. 1 (1978): 81-93;
45. and S. Wilson, "Infanticide, Child Abandonment, and Female Honour in Nineteenth-Century Corsica," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, no. 4 (1988): 762-83.
46. About five per cent of the cases were post-neonatal deaths (from the first day through eleven months of age) and were caused by poisoning, drowning, and extreme physical violence.
47. Green, "Infanticide and Infant Abandonment in the New South," 203.
48. For an excellent insight into the Kingston yards, see B. L. Moore and M. A. Johnson, eds., Squalid Kingston, 1890-1920: How the Poor Lived, Moved and had their Being (Mona, West Indies, 2000).
49. Daily Gleaner, 29 August 1905.
50. A resident magistrate's court was the lowest level of court in the island. It was presided over by two or more Justices of the Peace and dispensed summary justice as well as holding preliminary investigations into personal violence cases.
51. Circuit courts were an inferior trial-level court in which only barristers could appear. During the period under discussion, there were several African Jamaican barristers who had been trained in England. As the judge rode the 'circuit' to hold trials, it usually took several weeks before a case of infanticide or concealment of birth appeared before circuit court.
52. Daily Gleaner. 29 January 1915.
53. As not all newspaper reports of child murder cases mentioned the verdict, these figures are based on only 37 infanticide cases. This is a rather low acquittal rate compared to that in Britain at the time. Between 1839 and 1906, for example, nearly 85 per cent of all women charged with the murder of their newborn infant in London were acquitted. This difference in acquittal rates can largely be explained by the fact that in Jamaica the jury could return one of four verdicts, whereas in Britain a woman charged with the murder of her infant could only be found guilty or not and subsequently be retried for manslaughter or concealment of birth. See, A. R. Higginbotham, "'Sin of the Age': Infanticide and Illegitimacy in Victorian London," Victorian Studies, spring (1989), 330.
54. The Salvation Army operated a probation system by government consent. In 1937, one fourth of all women put on probation were sent to the Salvation Army's Girls' Home. Annual Report of the Prisons 1937, Colonial Office (hereafter, CO) 950/944.
55. Higginbotham, "Sin of the Age," 330.
56. Damme, "Infanticide," 16.
57. See, for example, D. Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 (Durham NC, 2004);
58. and A. Rao and S. Pierce, "Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, and Colonial Rule," Interventions 3, no. 2 (2001): 159-68.
59. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 264-68. For most people, the three stages presented separate stages in their life. Some men and women, however, moved back and forth from one type of relationship to another or stayed within one relationship all their life.
60. For a summary of contemporary ideas about the family formation partern, see B. L. Moore and M. A. Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865-1920 (Mona, West Indies, 2004), chap. 4. For a summary of scholarly interpretations of the pattern,
61. see R. T. Smith, "The Caribbean Family: Continuity and Transformation," in General History of the Caribbean: The Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, ed. B. Brereton (London/Oxford, 2004), 506-36.
62. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 288.
63. Some 26,400 women changed parishes between 1871 and 1921. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 149. On the rural distress, which stemmed largely from the decline of the sugar industry,
64. sec Eisner, Jamaica 1830-1930, chaps. 11 and 15.
65. E. Brodber, The Second Generation of Freemen in Jamaica, 1907-1944 (Gainesville, FL, 2004), 101;
66. E. Clarke, My Mother who Fathered Me: A Study of the Families in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica [1957] (Mona, West Indies, 1999), 67;
67. and E. Price, Bananaland: Pages from the Chronicle of an English Minister in Jamaica (London, 1930), 51.
68. On the sexual challenges and threats faced by young female domestics, see, for instance, the statement of Edith Clarke, chairman of the Board of Supervision, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925.
69. "The Salvation Army's Work," Daily Gleaner, 9 December 1905; "Annual Report of the YWCA for 1928-29," Daily Gleaner, 15 April 1929; and Questionnaire on Certain Matters connected with Social Welfare, CO950//944.
70. Daily Gleaner, 2 June 1932.
71. On the metropolitan debate about infanticide, sec Higginbotham, "Sin of the Age"; A. Hunt, "Calculations and Concealments: Infanticide in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain," Victorian Literature and Culture 34 (2006): 71-94;
72. C. L. Krueger, "Literary Defences and Medical Prosecutions: Representing Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century Britain," Victorian Studies 40 (1997): 271-94;
73. Marland, "Getting Away with Murder?" and L. Rose, The Massacre of the Innocent: Infanticide in Britain, 1800-1939 (London, 1986). The similarities between the debate in the Gleaner and the metropolitan debate is not surprising, as the editors and the letter writers were born in England or of English-descent.
74. "The Woman, the Jurors, the Judge and the Governor," Daily Gleaner, 28 November 1906.
75. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.
76. Following the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865, an elected Assembly was replaced by a Legislative Council made up of twelve men nominated by the governor. In 1884, an elected element was added to the Legislative Council.
77. "The Maintenance of Illegitimate Children," Daily Gleaner, 7 June 1926.
78. "Rev. Henry Clarke and the Knapp Case," Daily Gleaner, 2 July 1905. Emphasis mine. See also Clarke's letter to the editor Daily Gleaner, 31 October 1924 and Mrs W. E. Wilson's letter to the editor, Daily Gleaner, 3 November 1924.
79. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.
80. Daily Gleaner, 23 April 1897.
81. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.
82. "The Woman, the Jurors, the Judge and the Governor," Daily Gleaner, 28 November 1906.
83. "Expectant Mothers May Not Receive Death Sentence," Daily Gleaner, 20 February 1935.
84. Ward, "Legislating for Human Nature," 264 and 268; and Damme, "Infanticide," 15. In 1938, the term "newly born" was replaced by "a baby under one year old." This amendment accepted, in other words, what is now called "postnatal depression" as a defence in infanticide cases.
85. Ward, "Legislating for Human Nature," 257.
86. "Infanticide," Daily Gleaner, 24 April 1897.
87. From the European encounter with Africans in the fifteenth century until the very present, sexual behaviour has been an important marker of racial difference, especially that of women. See E. B. Higginbotham, "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17, no. 2 ( 1992): 251-74. On the process by which marriage was naturalised and idealised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
88. see J. R. Gillis; es, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages 1600-to the Present (Oxford, 1985).
89. Daily Gleaner, 31 January 1905.
90. See also Daily Gleaner, 6 June 1912.
91. Daily Gleaner, 17 September 1930.
92. Daily Gleaner, 23 February 1927.
93. Daily Gleaner, 17 August 1918.
94. African Jamaican women were not the only ones who adopted this strategy in the courtroom. See, for instance, Ruggiero, "Honor, Maternity, and the Disciplining of Women";
95. and Donovan, "Infanticide and the Juries in France, 1825-1913."
96. Daily Gleaner, 13 June 1918. Only Daniel was charged with and found guilty of murder. For other child murder cases committed with the help or at the direction of family members, see Daily Gleaner, 12 May 1906, 12 November 1915, 24 May 1924, and 13 July 1938.
97. Daily Gleaner, 10 June 1927.
98. See, for instance, Daily Gleaner, 22 February 1906, 27 August 1908, and 15 January 1924.
99. Daily Gleaner, 6 June 1912.
100. M. Kerr, Personality and Conflict in Jamaica (Liverpool, 1952), 44.
101. Daily Gleaner, 17 August 1918 and 2 June 1932.
102. CO 950/234.
103. Daily Gleaner, 12 May 1906 and 27 June 1906.
104. Daily Gleaner, 4 May 1926.
105. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 321.
106. Daily Gleaner, 28 September 1932.
107. R. A. Lobdell, "Women in the Jamaican Labour Force, 1881-1921," Social and Economic Studies 37, nos. 1-2 (1988): 213.
108. Questionnaire on Certain Matters Connected with Social Welfare, CO 950/944.
109. Daily Gleaner, 15 February 1908.
110. Daily Gleaner, 22 January 1918.
111. See, for instance, the statement of Roslyn Gordon in the Daily Gleaner, 12 November 1915.
112. Daily Gleaner, 16 October 1924.
113. Questionnaire on Certain Matters Connected with Social welfare, CO 950/944.
114. Statement by Edith Clarke, chairman of the Board of Supervision, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925.
115. Daily Gleaner. 23 April 1897.
116. Daily Gleaner, 23 April 1897. As the jury concluded that Ethel was not "responsible according to law when she did the act," the judge declared that she should be "kept in custody as a criminal lunatic at the Lunatic Asylum until the Governor's pleasure." Ethel was soon pardoned by the governor. In 1902, however, she was again charged with murdering a newborn infant.
117. See, Daily Gleaner, 13 October 1902. This confirms the recent contention that women with previous episodes of psychosis during the delivery run a high risk for recurrence after another birth.
118. See, for instance, K. L. Wisne et all., "Postpartum Disorders," in Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers who Kill, ed. M. G. Spinelli (Washington D.C and London, 2003), 54.
119. Daily Gleaner, 13 January 1924.
120. Daily Gleaner, 17 September 1930.
121. Daily Gleaner, 28 September 1932. For similar remarks,
122. see Daily Gleaner, 13 October 1902 and 13 October 1926.
123. Daly Gleaner, 28 September 1932.
124. See, for example, Mathilda Johnson, who had lived in the yard for six years but had not asked her neighbours for help. Daily Gleaner, 29 January 1915. On social isolation as a risk factor for child murder, see L. J. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," in Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers who Kill, ed. M. G. Spinelli (Washington D.C and London, 2003), 93.
125. Daily Gleaner, 30 June 1905. See, also Daily Gleaner 7 October 1908 and 16 August 1924.
126. M. Warren Beckwith, Block Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill, 1924), 62. For a similar explanation, see Memorandum on Old Age Pensions, CO 950/945.
127. Kerr, Personality and Conflict, 25
128. E. Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me, 66. Although this study was conducted in the late 1950s, the similarities between Clarke's findings and those of earlier anthropologists and the slow pace of change in rural Jamaica suggest that the norm of motherhood set out in her study was not markedly different from that after the turn of the century.
129. Kerr, Personality and Conflict, chaps 4 and 6.
130. M.Gaunt, Reflection in Jamaica (London, 1932), 64.
131. The elite and lower-class African Jamaicans, however, did not define these motherly duties in the same way and they also attached a different weight to them. See, my "Imagining Womanhood."
132. E. Brodber, "Afro-Jamaican Women at the Turn of the Century," Social and Economic Studies 35, no. 3 (1986): 25-26.
133. L. Mathurin Mair, "The Arrival of Black Women," Jamaica Journal 9, nos. 2-3 (1975): 5.
134. These measures were triggered by the threat of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. For other measures adopted to increase slave fertility. See, B. Bush-Slimani, "Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies," History Workshop Journal 36 (1993): 86-87.
135. On the various obstacles to mothering on the slave plantations, see my Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition (New York, 2007), chaps. 1-2.
136. Daily Gleaner, 30 August 1924. See also Daily Gleaner, 30 June 1905 and 27 January 1921.
137. Daily Gleaner, 19 April 1930.
138. Daily Gleaner, 31 January 1905 and 27 August 1908.
139. Daily Gleaner, 22 February 1906. For similar accounts,
140. see Daily Gleaner, 5 June 1909 and 29 January 1915.
141. Daily Gleaner, 4 January 1906.
142. Daily Gleaner, 27 August 1908. Emphasis mine.
143. "The Woman, the Jurors, the Judge and the Governor," Daily Gleaner, 28 November 1906.
144. Daily Gleaner, 23 May 1919 and 27 January 1921.
145. Moore and Johnson, Neither Led nor Driven, 41.
146. Daily Gleaner, 9 and 16 October 1924.
147. Daily Gleaner, 1 November 1930.
148. See also, Daily Gleaner, 4 January 1906, 12 May 1906, 27 June 1906, p. 66, 7 October 1908, 9 February 1910, 31 December 1914 and 12 June 1919.
149. See, for instance, Daily Gleaner, 30 march 1917, 20 June 1923, 6 November 1923, and 23 February 1927.
150. Daily Gleaner, 20 June 1923.
151. Daily Gleaner, 29 January 1915.
152. For asimilar case, see Daily Gleaner, 10 July 1907.
153. Daily Gleaner, 2 June 1932.
154. See, also the statements of Arabella Livermore and Pauline Hewitt in the Daily Gleaner, 29 August 1903 and 28 September 1932.
155. See, for instance, Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 101.
156. The first birth control clinic in metropolitan society was set up in 1921 by Mary Stopes. By the 1930s, information on contraception was also provided by child and welfare centres. A. McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History (Oxford, 1999), 68 and 81-82.
157. On the use of herbal means of contraception during slavery, see Bush-Slimani, "Hard Labour," 91-93.
158. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 47.
159. Statements of May Farquharson and Edith Clarke before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/234 and 925. For more on the birth control campaign, see J. B. Mcleary, "Amy Beckford Bailey: A Biography," The Jamaican Historical Review 18 (1993): 31-39.
160. Daily Gleaner, 27 November 1930. On the use of natural abortifacients,
161. see, Daily Gleaner, 5 May 1926; Gaunt, Reflection in Jamaica, 255;
162. and Beckwith, Block Roadways, 55.
163. P. E. Bryan, Philanthropy and Social Welfare in Jamaica (Mona, West Indies, 1990), 38.
164. On these attitudes, which still exist today, see M. Hodge, "We Kind of Family," in Gendered Realities: Essays m Caribbean Feminist Thought, ed. P. Mohammed (Mona, West Indies, 2002): 474-85;
165. and C. Sargent and M. Harris, "Gender Ideology, Childrearing, and Child Health in Jamaica," American Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (1992): 523-37.
166. See, for instance, Meyer, Mothers Who Kill, 43.
167. On crèches in metropolitan society, see J. E. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900-1939 (London, 1980), 80.
168. "Child Saving League Formed," Daily Gleaner, 17 November 1916; "Second Annual Meeting of the Child Saving League," Daily Gleaner, 21 December 1918; and Questionnaire on Certain Matters Connected with Social Welfare, CO 950/944.
169. Statement by Dr. T. J. Hallinan, director of the medical services, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925; and A. McCaw-Binns, "Safe Motherhood in Jamaica: From Slavery to Self-Determination," Paediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology, 19 (2005), 255. From 1919 onwards, midwives could only be registered to practise if they had sat a qualifying examination. A large proportion of the 900 registered midwives no longer practised or practised only sporadically.
170. Statement by Dr. T. J. Hallinan before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/925; Statement of Dr. Anderson, the Mayor of Kingston, before the 1938 West India Royal Commission, CO 950/926; and McCaw-Binns, "Safe Motherhood," 255. From 1937 onwards, women who could not pay the fee were admitted if they had a ticket for medical care. As there were only 1,200 ticket-distributors in the island, each of whom had the right to refuse a ticket, it was not always easy for poor women to get access to the Kingston maternity hospital.
171. For an insight into the work of a midwife employed by the parochial board, see the statement of midwife Julia Elison, Daily Gleaner, 19 April 1930.
172. "Child Welfare Association Hold Twentieth Annual General Meeting", Daily Gleaner, 22 June 1936;
173. Bryan, Philanthropy and Social Welfare, 39;
174. and McCaw-Binns, "Safe Motherhood," 256. Only the CWA received some government support for its services. A lack of funds explains to a large extent why the government did not set up a comprehensive system of child and maternal welfare. The West India Royal Commission, which investigated the causes of the 1938 labour riots, emphasised the poor provision of child and maternal welfare and recommended that the colonial government set up a machinery and administrative organisation through which child and maternal welfare policies and programmes could be developed and put into effect. This recommendation was taken up after the Second World War. See West India Royal Commission Report (London, 1945), chap. 11.
175. "Mrs. Knibb Defends Her Evidence before Commission Admonishes Mrs. DeCordova," to the editor, Plain Talk, 26 November 1938. Middle-class African Jamaican women were involved in various voluntary organisations, especially those that catered for women and children. The discrimination that they experienced in these organisations (e.g. African Jamaican women were seldom elected onto the executive) led some African Jamaican women to set up their own organisations. In 1938, for instance, Morris-Knibb along with Una Marson and Amy Bailey set up the Save the Children Fund. For more on the attitudes of middle-class African Jamaican women towards their lower-class sisters, see my "Misfortune of Being Black."
176. Roberts, The Population of Jamaica, 187;
177. and R. Floud, The People and the British Economy, 1830-1914 (Oxford/New York, 1997), 50.
178. Daily Gleaner, 10 June 1927. Active strategics are behavioural or psychological responses designed to change the nature of the anxieties and/or the perceptions held about them. Avoidant strategies, on the other hand, lead people into activities or mental states that keep them from directly addressing the stressful situation. http://www.earch/Psychological/notebook/coping.html
179. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 83.
180. Daily Gleaner, 9 January 1915.
181. Daily Gleaner, 15 January 1924. Neurohormonal factors prevent in these instances of pregnancy denial the onset of many pregnancy symptoms, while symptoms of pregnancy that are experienced, such as the movement of the fetus, are usually attributed to other factors, such as an upset stomach. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 84.
182. Miller, "Denial of Pregnancy," 93-94;
183. and Meyer, Mothers who Kill, chap. 2.
184. Daily Gleaner. 4 July 1930.
185. Daily Gleaner, 7 July 1911.
186. M. G. Spinelli, "Neonaticide: A Systematic Investigation of 17 Cases," in Infanticide: Psychosocial and Legal Perspectives on Mothers Who Kill, ed. M. G. Spinelli (Washington D.C. and London, 2003): 110.
187. A notable exception is Michelle Oberman's, "Understanding Infanticide in Context," which includes societal ideas about good mothering.
188. This did not mean, however, that it bestowed the same rights and duties on a couple as Anglican marriage in metropolitan society. A slave couple, for instance, could at any time be separated by their planter, and a husband or wife could not prevent the other from leaving the relationship.
189. Between 1808 and 1922, the Anglican Church performed 3,600 marriages on a slave population of 330,000. Nonconformist missionaries performed far more marriages. The Moravians, for example, performed 189 marriages on three of their stations between 1827 and 1834. Parliamentary Papers, 1823, vol. xciii, 320-21; and B. W. Higman, Slave Populations in the Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore, 1984), 116. Pressure from the Imperial government and abolitionists led the Jamaican legislature to amend the marriage clause in the Slave Law in 1826. As it did away with the marriage fee but firmly kept in place written permission, the amendment did little to increase Anglican slave marriage. For more on slave marriage, see my Representations of Slave Women, chap. 4.
190. See, for instance, G. W. Roberts and S. A. Sinclair, Women in Jamaica: Patterns of Reproduction and Family (Millwood, 1978), chap. 1; and Smith, "The Caribbean Family," 527.
191. On the glorification of motherhood in metropolitan society in the aftermath of the Boer War, see, for instance, A. Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop Journal 5 (1978): 8-65;
192. and J. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900-1939 (London, 1980).