Infanticide and the Racialized Construction of Fordist Motherhood: Household Surveillance, Suspicious Death Investigations, and the Education of “Neglectful” Mothers in Chicago, 1872–1911

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of a Fordist political economy signaled a reconstruction of production, social reproduction, and class, gender, and racial hierarchies. In this context, politicians and new professionals focused on conserving infants as a valuable national asset. Infanticide offers a powerful lens through which to understand new practices of household surveillance, the expanding authority of new professions, and new expectations for working-class mothers. This new effort to conserve infant life was racialized: white infant lives mattered to the white professionals who measured, investigated, and educated working-class mothers; black infant lives did not.

We explore these changes through Chicago, a leading metropolis of the Americas, using archival material from local reform and professional organizations, newspapers, and multiple government agencies. At the heart of the article are 1,270 suspicious infant death investigations from the Cook County Coroner between 1872 and 1911, which we extracted and coded from over 100 volumes of handwritten inquest verdicts.

We analyze two major shifts in the inquest language. Drawing from the work of Laura Shelton and Nora Jaffary on Mexico, we trace the rise of increasingly professionalized medical language. Even more revealing are changes in the inquest language of “neglect.” In the 1870s, coroners typically used “neglect” to suggest a mother’s ignorance or lack of access to essential resources for childcare. By the early twentieth century, a more punitive conception of “willful neglect” arose, which attributed infant death to mothers who failed to adequately care for newborns. In addition, we build on the work of Elna Green and Felicity Turner on the US South by exploring racialized campaigns to train supposedly neglectful mothers. Surveillance, education, and resources in Chicago were disproportionately directed towards white, working-class mothers, as the growing African American presence in Chicago disrupted professional planners’ visions of modern motherhood.