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<p><italic>Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century
America</italic> traces how modern ideas about gender and race became embedded in
the institutions of law and government between the Revolution and the end of Reconstruction.
Contemporary understandings of gender and race actually consolidated only in the aftermath
of the Civil War, as communities embraced beliefs that women and African Americans
constituted distinctive groups with shared, innate characteristics related solely
to the fact that they were female or racially different. People then applied these
ideas about gender and race to all arenas of life, including the law. </p>
<p>Yet understanding the roles of women and African Americans through universalizing
legal conceptions of gender and/or race--conceptions that crystallized in law only
in the wake of the Civil War--elides the complexity of the ways in which antebellum
communities responded to the interactions of women, the enslaved, and free blacks
with the legal system. My study's focus on infanticide, a crime that could only be
perpetrated by females, reveals how women--and men--of all races involved themselves
in the day-to-day legal processes that shaped the daily lives of Americans during
the early republic and antebellum periods. Communities responded to cases of infant
death informed by understandings of motherhood and child mortality specific to that
particular case and individual, rather than shaping outcomes--as they began to do
so after the Civil War--based on broad assumptions about the race or gender of the
offender. My conclusions are drawn from almost one hundred cases of infanticide and
infant death between 1789 and 1877 gleaned primarily from court records and newspapers
in Connecticut, Illinois, and North Carolina. In addition, the study draws on reports
of other instances from around the nation, as narrated in sources such as diaries,
periodicals, newspapers, crime pamphlets, and medical journals.</p>
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