Demented Mothers

By Christine Gardner

Demented Mothers is a Thesis on Infanticide and Child Murder in early 20th century Australia. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Gardner
• Release date: Sep 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386457602

Christine Gardner

Christine has had a fascination for history most of her life. When the youngest of her five sons started school Christine went back to school as well. After several years at TAFE, studying both visual arts and writing, she went to university and eventually graduated with a BA in History/Philosophy of Religion, with Honours. She's written all kinds of books since then, most with at least some history included.

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Other Books by the Author

Non-fiction

Not Guilty—Murder of Innocents

What Did You Say?

Fiction

The Inheritance

Her Flesh and Blood

Dark Innocence

Red Dust Series

Stony Creek

The Road to Karinya

Red Wine and Summer Storms

For Young Adults and Children

Sanctuary

Last Chance

Beast of War

Connections

No-one’s Good at Everything

Chilli—The Great Hunter

Demented Mothers

A Thesis on Child Murder in Australia in the early 20th Century

© Christine Gardner 2005

Demented Mothers

Introduction

MARY FROST WAS NINETEEN when she gave birth to an illegitimate child in the Women’s Hospital in Melbourne on 15 June 1916. She had spent several weeks before the birth, and a further ten days after her release from hospital, at the Salvation Army Maternity Home in North Fitzroy.[1] She was returning to her home in Hamilton when she threw her baby from the moving train on the ‘impulse of the moment’.[2] The child’s body was found approximately an hour and a half later by railway workers who described it as still warm, with bubbles around its mouth as if it was ‘breathing its last’.[3] At the inquest Mary was found to have wilfully murdered the baby, but the Supreme Court jury found her not guilty because of temporary insanity.[4]

Many young, single women like Mary were unable to cope with motherhood in the early twentieth century. Judith Allen, in her study of women and crime in Australia, suggests that young domestic servants were the most likely to commit infanticide in late nineteenth century Australia. She argues that the victims were usually newborns, and conventions were established within the court system to deal sympathetically with these young mothers. She claims that, after 1910, perpetrators were just as likely to be married women, but the conventions used to deal leniently with infanticide remained.[5] In nineteenth century New South Wales, infanticide was punishable by death. In spite of this almost 300 babies were found dead in Sydney between 1881 and 1899,[6] most of them murdered.[7] These figures suggest that infanticide was a fact of life in the colonies, if not openly acknowledged. Allen’s study is based primarily in New South Wales, as part of a larger study of crime involving women both as perpetrators and as victims. She uses extensive statistical data and gives brief examples of particular cases. I am also examining court outcomes in child murder cases, but my focus is on Victoria, and I will be looking at four cases in detail, using both press reports and criminal records. The subjects of my study are all single rural women who killed their children between 1910 and 1916, although two of them went to Melbourne to give birth. I will examine three cases involving young mothers killing infants and one case involving an older mother in a de-facto relationship who killed her three children. All four women were from rural areas, but from varying social classes. In only one case was the perpetrator found guilty and sentenced to death. There was a strong recommendation of mercy because of her youth and she was freed on probation. In three cases the juries found the women not guilty. I will also investigate what drove these mothers to kill their children. Were they unable to cope with the social stigma of illegitimacy, or were there other economic and social pressures which led to their actions?

Infanticide was seen as a lesser crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century than illegitimacy, according to Shurlee Swain. Death, as a solution to the problem of illegitimacy, was ‘seldom questioned’. The low risk of detection, Swain argues, made infanticide ‘an attractive alternative to bearing a stigma for life’.[8] The methods of killing used by the women in this thesis seem to indicate more a killing of impulse than a decision to choose the ‘more attractive alternative’. Swain argues that murders involving newly-born infants were treated differently to those where older babies were killed. The press identified the older babies as children rather than objects, but mothers were still treated sympathetically.[9] Historians have written extensively on infanticide, but little on the killing of older children by their mothers. I will investigate the treatment, by the press and the legal system, of a mother who killed her three children, a daughter aged four and twins aged two, and compare that with the treatment of those who killed infants.

Kathy Laster, in her study of feminist criminological theory, claims that the ‘medicalisation’ of courts in the nineteenth century was one way of dealing with ‘female deviance’ and that ‘madness’ in women was more acceptable than ‘badness’.[10] Were female murderers (of their children) regarded as insane because society, including the press, judges and juries, could not conceive of a woman killing her own child as a sane rational being? Or was insanity used by the legal system as a means of avoiding a punishment seen as unreasonable?

Stephen Garton, in his study of incarceration in New South Wales, argues that the twentieth century saw an increasing interpretation of behaviours previously regarded as ‘moral depravity’, as ‘products of mental disease’.[11] In his history of insanity in New South Wales, he claims that women were seen, by the medical profession and by the public, as more prone to mental stress than men, because of ‘biological changes’, such as puberty and childbirth.[12] Marriage and motherhood were seen as a woman’s greatest achievements and mental breakdown was often attributed to sexual experience which did not lead to marriage. Childbirth was also considered to be a cause of insanity. Mania was usually evident within a few days of the birth, while ‘melancholia’ could develop months later and continues for years.[13] None of the women in this study were confined in mental hospitals. Garton argues that theories of women’s vulnerability to mental illness ‘influenced local doctors, police and families to see behaviour which didn’t conform to expectations to be the product of mental illness’.[14] Was this the reason the legal system and the press treated mothers who killed their children with sympathy