ABSTRACT
Baby-farming as a profession was both despised and stigmatised, since its existence emphasised the contradictions between dominant images of idealised motherhood, and its reality for those women whose circumstances did not fit this image. Thus, baby-farming could only exist within a culture that stigmatised illegitimate children, and which almost totally excluded the single mother from the necessary means to support herself and her child. Concern over infanticide intensified between 1860–1865 when it increasingly became associated with moral decline and ‘un-British’ conduct and as such presented “a threat to the social order and civilised values.” It is within this context that a moral panic had developed by 1870 about some of the practices associated with baby-farming. Baby-farmers were nearly always working-class women, so impoverished that even when they did not kill their charges intentionally, many died anyway from neglect and malnutrition as baby-farmers did not possess the means or skills necessary to care adequately for the infants.
