The historical study of infanticide is a small but growing subfield that connects to numerous other fields such as the history of law, state building, medicine, reproduction, family, gender, religion, and patriarchy, among others. Recognizing the growing interesting in this fresh and powerful subfield, the Journal of Social History has committed to publish an upcoming special edition dedicated to the topic of infanticide in the Americas, with 13 contributors who study countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, the U.S., and Canada. There is little research on this subject prior to the twentieth century throughout the Western Hemisphere, and the contributors are distributed across several countries. Therefore, the AHA offers us an invaluable opportunity for some of these contributors to meet in person, share research, and collaborate. Therefore, I am proposing two panels at AHA 2024, each populated by contributors to the Social History special edition: the panel for this proposal will contain scholars from the US and Canada; the other panel (Title: “Infanticide in Latin America...”) contains three of the Latin Americanist contributors. These panels will not only improve each individual project but also foster greater cohesion across the articles in the journal publication.

While there is far more research on infanticide in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we know comparatively little about this phenomenon in the nineteenth century. As in Latin America, governments in the U.S. and Canada took new steps towards criminalizing infanticide in the late nineteenth century. These efforts intersected with campaigns to criminalize abortion, replace midwives with medical doctors, and expand state police powers to surveil populations. These changes were part of a wider effort underway throughout the Atlantic world to police women’s sexuality and reproductive autonomy, ostensibly to “improve” national morals and “modernize” society. These papers explore the connections between states’ intensified focus on infanticide and shifting social and labor conditions in the nineteenth century, which included tensions over urban growth and immigration as well as struggles over free labor and racial hierarchy in the postemancipation South. The papers suggest that states’ prosecution of infanticide, then, targeted vulnerable demographic groups and intersected with wider efforts to control the poor, maintain white racial domination, reduce violent crime, and impose middle-class values on the working class. These developments occurred within the context of a growing consciousness about age, childhood, and sexual development that framed responses to both victims and perpetrators of infanticide.

This panel will deepen our understanding of how the growing transnational movements to address infanticide connects to myriad factors that were driving change throughout the US and Canada. This panel will enable comparisons of these factors across the geographically distinct regions of the Reconstruction south, a rapidly growing Chicago, and the vastness of Ontario province. Panelists and the audience will have the opportunity to identify patterns in such areas as the labor market, social tensions related to race and immigration, the medical profession, concerns over the age of criminal victims and defendants, efforts to reduce infant mortality, and police and judicial structures.