There has nevertheless been a marked tendency within medical literature to extrapolate from animal behavior to human mothers. In 1964, for example, animal behaviorists observed that goats reject their offspring, butting them away, if they are separated after birth for even five minutes. In short order, it was cautioned that women might have the same response. This idea was developed by other scientists, in other laboratories and barnyards, and in 1974, the notion was broadcast that mothers went through a biologically “sensitive” period, immediately after birth, when they had to have skin-to-skin contact with their infants or they wouldn’t bond. This in turn gave rise to a host of articles in nursing and medical journals, as well as the popular media, about how a baby had to be brought to the mother as soon as possible in the hospital, lest the critical period lapse and she butt the baby off her bed.
Ideas about instinctual maternal attachment also come from studies of infant bonding needs, which actually show that the identity of a primary caretaker is irrelevant to the infant, so long as care is consistent and empathic. If a mother dies in childbirth, a child is not developmentally thwarted if a father or stepmother or nanny takes the infant into his or her care. With disconcerting frequency, however, the findings on infant bonding get reversed in medical literature so that the instinctual attachment needs of a baby are portrayed as the instinctual responses of the mother. At the same time, the term “primary caretaker” mysteriously disappears and is replaced by the word “mother,” so that attachment and bonding remain exclusive to the experience of women.
What is really going on here is that science is reinforcing the transcendent sentiment of a unique mother-child bond, an ideal that has waxed and waned throughout history, regaining currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a division of labor between the sexes intensified in the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society. When men were forced into the factories and mines, women came to symbolize the nurturant safety of the home and took on attributes of softness and sentimentality they hadn’t possessed before. As labor divisions grew starker, so did the character attributes of gender.
Idealizing women into a tender-hearted class of perfect mothers does not lead them to behave that way. Dr. Stuart Asch, a psychiatrist and analyst at New York Hospital, began his career in the 1950s by serving as a liaison to the obstetrics ward, counseling pregnant women. The women confided their anxieties to him: that pregnancy made them ungainly, robbing them of their beauty; that their husbands wouldn’t take them out to dinner anymore; that, sometimes, they had “crazy thoughts,” like wishing their baby was dead. “I started to wonder why so many women were saying this,” Asch recalls. This was the fifties, after all; women were ascending to the summit of their identity as mothers in the months leading up to birth. What could possibly make them so disconsolate? Asch also wondered what would happen to the women he spoke with after the babies were born. Would they still have “crazy thoughts”?
Tracking the women he felt were at risk over a period of years, Asch found a high incidence of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome among their children. He published his suspicions of infanticide in a medical journal. The article marked the beginning and the end of his research. “The SIDS people got women to write me terrible letters, awful letters. What kind of a man was I to suggest that a woman could kill her child?” Asch wasn’t willing to venture into the arena. “I dropped my work.” Very few doctors or academics have proved any more willing than Asch was to challenge the maternal ideal.
The sentimental vision of Mother in the nineteenth century has persisted well into the twentieth, left intact by feminists when so many other so-called female attributes have been radically challenged. Indeed, the maternal ideal lies at the very heart of feminist resistance to the possibility of female aggression. Thus when feminists have pondered infanticide at all, they have tended to construe it as a masculine conspiracy to make good women do bad things. Of Ellwood, Greenport, Long Island, resident Deb Winsor wrote to Long Island’s Suffolk Times: “I find the verdict to be another sad and pathetic indictment of our legal system as it addresses women’s reproductive rights.… Once again our system reinforces that men have the option of abdicating their reproductive responsibility after conception.” A letter to Newsday from Shirley Abbott Tomkievicz read: “Many of us seem to view female sexuality as a punishable offense.… Why wasn’t [the father] on trial for manslaughter as well? Is this 1991 or 1691?”
“Under Christianity,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1975, “infanticide was forbidden as a policy but it continued nonetheless to be practiced as an individual act, in which women, raped or seduced and then branded with their ‘sin,’ and under pain of torture or execution, have in guilt, self-loathing and blind desperation done away with the newborns they had carried in their bodies.” Of course, history is rich with evidence that married women freely loved and made love to their husbands, and took freely chosen lovers, and did not treat the offspring of those unions well. Thirty-three percent of the infanticides in France during the eighteenth century were committed by securely married middle- and upper-class women. Infant abandonment and killing were rather rampant among the aristocratic women of Greece and Rome. In all these cases, there were abundant servants to whom such offspring could be farmed; in very few instances had the mothers been tortured or executed.
Infanticide has been committed throughout human history for a multiplicity of reasons—personal, political, superstitious, and strategic. Whether or not a culture supports the perpetrators of infanticide, it is, like other forms of violence, highly mutable. In many cultures, offspring weren’t considered to be fully human until they reached a certain age, one or two, sometimes three years old. Perhaps the most common cause of violence against infants arose from the need to space children in the absence of birth control. The Japanese word for infanticide means “weeding,” as in the thinning of rice saplings. Today, in some of the poorest communities in the world, infanticide as birth control takes a passive-aggressive form: babies are given birth to, then simply not fed. Cultures have also engaged in crude forms of eugenics, turning against twins, against girls, against deformities—as some societies continue to do, now, through selective abortion. Infants have been killed, as well, during famine, or in the midst of war, or as an offering in ritual sacrifice.
Stepparents have often posed a particular threat to infants and small children, primarily, it seems, for sociopolitical reasons—the desire to preserve their own bloodline when resources (food and inheritable land) were scarce. Hence the origin of wicked stepmother figures in fairy tales. The monstrous relations of Snow White and Cinderella were dreamed up by their tellers as cautionary figures—not of the inherent evil of women but of the perils of being a stepchild. Some scholars argue that human beings, like other mammals, have an instinctive hostility to genetically unrelated offspring. The psychologists Margo Wilson and Martin Daly point out that in the United States a preschool-age stepchild is one hundred times more likely than a biological child to fall victim to familial homicide. In 1996, a twenty-three-year-old C. W. Post College psychology student was arrested for paying three thousand dollars to an undercover police officer to smother her boyfriend’s toddler, born to another woman. To the evolutionary psychologist, this woman was acting on an ancient, preconscious drive to promote her own DNA. She was jealous, but her jealousy had magnificent instinctual cause.
Infanticides that convey the deepest mythic resonance are acts of Medea-like revenge against the patriarch, in which a mother harms or kills her children to strike at the father. Medea is a figure of Greek legend who was abandoned by her husband, Jason, who claimed to love her still but said he needed to marry a princess so that he might realize his dream to be king. Medea, like her grandmother, Tyro, avenged herself for this insult and betrayal by destroying Jason’s two beloved sons. A modern name for this, typically implying mental illness, surfaced in the 1990s: “divorce-related malicious mother syndrome.” In 1994, Maria Montalvo, a nurse in Union Beach, New Jers
ey, drove her son and daughter to her ex-husband’s home. She doused the car in gasoline, rang the doorbell, and, when he stood upon the threshold, set the car ablaze. While it is extremely rare in North America to see such retaliation taken to the extreme of filicide, the destruction of children as an act of revenge or rebellion has its place in history. Psychologist Shari Thurer has suggested that a woman’s resentment of her status as a second-class citizen related to high infanticide rates among Greek aristocrats. Historian Ann Jones describes widespread infanticide in colonial America as a “revolutionary” act in a “patriarchal society,” committed by women who resented being punished for sex.
Historically, it has been difficult to isolate individual female motive from cultural practice and belief. Personal impulses in the murder of infants merge, as Brandt Steele notes, “almost imperceptibly into other forms of infanticide that relate to economic, moral, religious, political, or military causes.” In the twentieth century, no explicit cultural support for this deed exists, and as a result, it ought to be easier for us to see the nuanced diversity in female experience that inspires the crime. But if this is increasingly true for child homicide and fatal child abuse, we are still prone to sweeping and reductive generalizations where infanticide is concerned. According to Donna Stewart, a physician and the head of the Women’s Health department at Toronto General Hospital, “Women who commit infanticide run a wide spectrum, from those in denial, who were concealing their pregnancy and concealed its consequence, to highly impulsive women who, in a fit of rage, shake their baby to death, to manic-depressive women, to those who are suffering from classical depression who wind up killing their babies and themselves.” They are women from all classes, all races, all shades of fortitude, sanity, love. “We need,” Stewart notes, “to broaden our categories, recognize the individuality of women, so that we can confront risk on a case-by-case basis.”
Research on maternal aggression is stunningly scant. Most of it is lumped into a single category of madness, linked directly to female hormones. “Postpartum depression,” also known as “new mother syndrome,” has been advanced for well over a century to explain why good women, culturally celebrated mothers, would turn inexplicably violent. About half of all women who give birth do experience a hormonal shift within three to eight days that makes them disconsolate, weepy, or irritable. Sometimes called the “baby blues,” this passing storm is loosely comparable to how one feels in early pregnancy or premenstrually. It isn’t a springboard for serious aggression. It comes, it goes. The body resolves itself. About one in five hundred women, however, get more unhinged when they have a baby, to the point of becoming suicidal or homicidal. Some enter a frightening realm of the mind known as postpartum psychosis. They become delusional, they hallucinate, their babies fall from bridges, are suffocated, drown. Within the medical community, there are those who insist that postpartum psychosis is purely hormonal, that if women are treated with hormone supplements while still in the hospital after giving birth, they’ll remain grounded and content in their new maternal role. Internationally, the most prominent advocates of this view are members of the Marce Society, a research organization devoted to isolating the biological underpinnings of postpartum disorders. The logic implicit within this view is that hormonal insanity is something to which all women are automatically susceptible as soon as they get wheeled out of the delivery room.
In England, support for hormones as the cause of all maternal aggression against infants is enshrined in the law. In 1922, parliament introduced the Infanticide Act, which reduced the crime automatically from murder to manslaughter on the basis of insanity if a mother “had not fully recovered from the effect of giving birth to such child, but by reason thereof the balance of her mind was then disturbed.” The point of the Infanticide Act was not that British doctors had suddenly discovered a link between postpartum hormones and violent behavior. To this day that link hasn’t been categorically established. The point was to rid the courts of the necessity of imposing murder sentences, since juries had been refusing to convict women when the penalty was execution. For instance, following five thousand coroner’s inquests into child deaths held annually in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, only thirty-nine convictions for child murder resulted, and none of those women were executed. Similarly, in Canada, when a mandatory death penalty applied to the murder of children, “courts regularly returned ‘not guilty’ verdicts in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”
In 1938, Britain revised its infanticide statute, extending the age of victims from “newly born” to “under the age of 12 months.” To justify this extension, the revised statute cited “the effect of lactation” on a woman’s mind. It was decided, in effect, that breastfeeding could drive women mad. The experts who proposed the revision to the courts privately believed that social and psychological factors were more critical than biology. Studies consistently show, for example, that preexisting histories of depression and life stress are a common denominator in women with postpartum mental disorders. But psychiatrist J. H. Morton defended the diagnosis of “lactational insanity” as being acceptable to conservative judges and barristers. It was never proposed that the Infanticide Act forgive mothers for killing older children, spouses or others, even while said to be suffering from the same insanity.
Adopting the discreet position of British psychiatrists, the American Psychiatric Association views childbirth as simply a trigger for a variety of psychiatric conditions. The APA bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), has no listing for postpartum psychosis but cites “postpartum onset” for certain mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and clinical depression. In pre-World War II Britain, psychiatrists believed that “exhaustion psychosis” due to sleep deprivation was more operative as a risk factor for mothers than hormonal change. Recognized in both England and the United States, exhaustion psychosis refers, essentially, to being so tired that one can’t navigate the shoals of reality anymore. Anyone who has gone without sleep for a long period of time knows what it’s like. Truckers, doctor-trainees, nurses, soldiers, and new parents can all describe the experience of being so exhausted that they get delusional, disoriented, extremely emotional. Mundane annoyances can trigger weird, wild rages and crying jags. Pushed to the brink, people in this condition temporarily lose their grip. Some hallucinate. When sleep deprivation combines with the constant demands of a baby, a lack of support, and insecurity or resentment about parenting, a normally well-balanced person can come perilously close to violence. This is not true just of biological mothers. Fathers and adoptive mothers have been documented with postpartum onset exhaustion psychosis.
Kate R., an upbeat, happily married woman in her thirties with some money in the bank and lots of solid family around her, gave birth to her first baby in 1992 and fell into the special hell of infant colic. She recalls the precipitous crash downward from her elation as an expectant mother: “When I was pregnant, it was wonderful. The sex was great, people were terrific, they smiled at me on the street, they helped me out. Then you give birth and doors slam on the stroller.” Add colic: “After Claire was born, when we were still in the hospital, I could hear her crying down the hall. No one else’s baby was crying. And she wouldn’t stop, it just wouldn’t stop. The nurses would say, ‘Maybe it’s your milk.’ They’d have to bring her to me so often to try to calm her … they’d give me these looks. From the word ‘go’ even the hospital society was telling me, ‘This isn’t cool.’ ”
Kate sits in her New York living room, cross-legged, cradling a cup of tea. Claire is out in Central Park with her father, who was attentively present through the nightmare, right away giving Kate a leg up to sanity that some mothers don’t have. “I can see how sleep deprivation is a torture, how it’s used all over the world. At one point I didn’t wash my hair for ten days, because washing your hair takes six minutes, and that was six minutes to sleep. It was scary, because I could not relieve her pain, and I felt it was s
omething I was doing wrong. My exasperation and exhaustion turned to fury in the middle of the night. Motherhood wasn’t what I wanted it to be. It wasn’t my ideal.” Beset with conflicting emotions, unhinged by exhaustion, Kate felt turned upside down. “So you lose it, you lose it. You feel like you’re not going to be able to cut it, that you’re not going to be a good mother.… I would never have hurt my daughter, but I can see that, in the worst way, it’s reasonable to think of smothering the baby, just making it stop.”
Kate had a loving and supportive extended family, who took Claire off her hands for hours at a time. But what if she’d had none? What if she were isolated, and the expectation of perfection was that much more intense? What if her personality was that much more impulsive or volatile? What if, biochemically, her brain were more vulnerable to psychosis? What if she’d grown up in a violent family, so that lashing out in a sleepless frenzy didn’t seem all that crazy? These are factors that add their force to individual women’s responses, becoming trigger mechanisms for fatal abuse.
Kathleen Householder, of Rippon, West Virginia, smashed a rock over the head of her two-week-old daughter to make her stop “fussing.” Eighteen-year-old Josephine Mesa, of San Diego, battered her two-month-old baby with a toilet plunger. Sheryl Lynn Massip, of Orange County, California, had no sleep for six weeks, took her colicky baby outside, put him on the road, and ran over him with her car. Had these women been treated with “hormone supplements,” as the advocates of postpartum psychosis suggest, would they have been any less tired? Less isolated, ambivalent, impulsive, or stressed? Interestingly, one of the strongest advocates of the hormonal basis of postpartum disorders, Katherine Dalton, notes in her 1989 book Depression After Childbirth that depression and psychosis were less severe in the early part of this century, when mothers were permitted to stay in the hospital for up to fourteen days, surrounded by supportive staff who gave them help and let them rest.
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