'What woman is safe...?': Coerced medical examinations, suspected infanticide, and the response of the women’s movement in Britain, 1871-1881

The subject of infanticide in Britain during the nineteenth century has received scholarly attention only relatively recently. Moreover, few works have noted the direct connections between the first major feminist critique of how infanticide was dealt with by the Victorian criminal justice system, published in 1871, and other campaigns by the women's movement which also focused on the double standard of sexual morality. This article examines what has been hitherto a largely neglected aspect of feminist thinking in the 1870s, arguing that responses to the judicial treatment of infanticide defendants were part of broader critiques of medical and legal practice. Furthermore, it explains why this groundbreaking analysis by early feminists was unevenly pursued and had all but vanished from the agenda of the women's movement by 1881, not to be resumed until shortly before the First World War.