Women, Infanticide and the Press, 1822-1922
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A01=Nicola Goc
Author_Nicola Goc
Bastardy Clause
Category=KNTP2
Central Middlesex
Convict Women
Coroner's Court
Coroner’s Court
Coronial Inquiries
critical discourse analysis
Dreadful Tragedy
Edwin Lankester
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Female Convicts
Foucauldian theory power
Free Woman
Hobart Town
Hobart Town Courier
infanticidal
Infanticidal Woman
Infanticide News
Infanticide Reports
Infanticide Trial
legal history women
Leicester Mercury
media representations crime
Medical Coroner
Medical Expert Witness
News Discourse
News Texts
nineteenth-century journalism
Poor Law Commissioners
Press Discourse
press narratives female criminality
Social Science Congress
Van Diemen's Land
Van Diemen’s Land
Victorian gender studies
woman
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781138251557
- Weight: 400g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 17 Oct 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed their babies. Her study takes Foucault’s perspective that the production of knowledge, of 'facts' and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century infanticidal woman - known as ’the Infanticide’ - into being. The actions of the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a woman’s actions destroyed a man’s lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates, infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century discourse. For example, the Times used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide. At the same time, infanticide news stories shaped how women who killed their babies were known and understood in ways that pathologised their actions. This, in turn, influenced medical, judicial, and welfare policies regar
Nicola Goc is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Journalism and European Languages at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
