By 1922, Britain and most western European nations had passed legislation that defined infanticide, the murder of an infant by its mother within one year of its birth, as a distinctive class of murder and one that required less severe punishment than other forms of homicide. No American state passed similar legislation, and American women who murdered their infants within a year of giving birth faced the same charges they would have if they had killed anyone else. They also faced the same punishments that other murderers did. This dissertation examines the period between 1860 and 1920 in an effort to understand how and why American responses to infanticide and the women associated with it came to differ so significantly from those of their British and European counterparts.

Through an examination of a variety of popular culture texts and of legal and medical literature, this dissertation investigates how these locally-created and trans-Atlantic influences helped shape American thinking about infanticide during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The dissertation also analyzes a sampling of infanticide cases that appeared at coroner's inquests and criminal trials in two Pennsylvania counties. Through an assessment of the verdicts of the jurymen, who served as representatives of their communities during these proceedings, the sentences handed down by the judges, and the testimonies of the men and women who appeared as witnesses, these cases reveal the degree to which Americans accepted, rejected, and amended the prescriptive rhetoric of the infanticide discourse that was generated by legal and medical professionals and by the various forms of popular culture. When examined together, these sources demonstrate that Americans did not need or want specific legislation that would have imposed predetermined legal responses to the crime. Instead, the existing framework of state-based laws and community-level courts allowed American communities to respond to each incidence of infanticide in a manner that reflected and reinforced local norms and beliefs about sexuality, motherhood, insanity, criminality, punishment, appropriate gender behavior, and the value of infant life.