Class Analysis and the Killing of the Newborn Child: Manchester, 1790–1860
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the practice of neonaticide – the killing of an infant at the moment of birth – in Manchester during the first decades of the industrial revolution. Using a set of previously unexamined pre-trial witness statements, the author makes the case that newborn-killing was practised by working-class women in the town as a known and even accepted form of birth control. There is quite suggestive evidence that women had a language for this practice, shielded other women from having it reported, and in certain circumstances, assisted one another in carrying it out. This finding resonates with similar moral frameworks that have been studied from high-medieval England to early colonial Mexico. Nonetheless, it has also been well established that middle-class people throughout the nineteenth century in Britain abhorred infant killing, associated it strongly with stigmatized stereotypes of working-class maternity, and sought to suppress it using the punitive weight of the law. Period diaries and publications show that this ‘moral panic’ was as potent in Manchester as anywhere else. Taking these contrary patterns together, the author suggests that neonaticide and practices like it allow historians to observe the profound cultural divisions and frictions along class lines which structured life in the early industrial city.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".