Book Review: Female Criminality: Infanticide, Moral Panics and the Female Body
| Author | Emma Cunliffe |
| Published date | 01 August 2016 |
| Date | 01 August 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663916647530a |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Social & Legal Studies 25(4)
ANNIE COSSINS, Female Criminality: Infanticide, Moral Panics and the Female Body. Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan, 2015, pp. 312, ISBN 978-1-137-29942-0, £65.00 (hbk).
Annie Cossins’ book Female Criminality: Infanticide, Moral Panics and the Female
Body is an essential reading for any scholar who is interested in criminalized women,
motherhood and the law. The book also makes significant contributions to theoretical
and historical understandings of moral regulation. Among the key contributions are
Cossins’ argument that attention to the sexed body helps to explain popular, medical
and governmental responses to the problem of infanticide, her critical assessment and
reworking of the moral panic scholarship, and the careful manner in which she traces the
resonance between mid-19th-century anxieties about infant homicide and late 20th-
century concerns about multiple infant deaths in middle-class families.
Cossins’ work on the sexed body was first published in this journal in 2003 (Cossins,
2003). In that article, Cossins drew on a case study of the experiences of Aboriginal
sexual assault complainants in New South Wales to consider the analytic utility of a
concept of the sexed body. In Cossins’ account, the sexed body differs from the more
widely used feminist conception of gender: ‘gender is considered to describe cultural
differences . . . which arise from performance, that is, active social practices’ (Cossins,
2003: 83), whilst the sexed body is concerned with ‘how we understand the body,
corporeality, sexual difference and the sex/gender distinction’ (Cossins, 2003: 84). This
focus on the corporeal aspects of sex is carried through Cossins’ study in Female
Criminality of the moral regulation of unmarried working-class women, midwives and
baby farmers of the mid-19th century. In keeping with her prior work, Cossins is atten-
tive to how sexing practices vary with factors such as social class and race. Ultimately,
this book is a record of her work ‘to discern the particular cultural meanings ascribed to
the body of the female murderer [of infant victim(s)]’ (p. 13).
Infanticide, in Cossins’ title and throughout the book, does not have its technical legal
meaning of the killing of an infant under the age of 1 year by his or her mother. Rather, a
core concern for Cossins’ research is the differences and continuities between social
responses to infanticide by unmarried mothers and infant homicides committed by
women to whose care infants were entrusted by working-class mothers of the 19th
century.
Cossins is also interested in sharpening the concept of moral panics and, in...
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