"Workhouse Nurses- Baby Farming"

        On the left, a child tied to a chair is falling into the fireplace. Behind that child, a baby is falling off a bed filled with crying babies. On the right, an infant is being thrown into hot water. The images described are all illustrated on the front page in the January 18, 1868 issue of The Illustrated Police News (IPN).
        The IPN begins the “Workhouse Nurses- Baby Farming: Horrible Death of an Infant in Wigan Workhouse” article by explaining how the graphic sketches on the front page are meant to reflect the “poor little” children who are treated under inhumane and horrific conditions. These children are a part of the “Baby Farming” practice. According to Richard Clark of The Capital Punishment UK, his text “‘Baby Farming’- A Tragedy of Victorian Times” explains that during the Victorian era, abortion and abandonment were illegal. Therefore, the practice was formed as a legal “social service” for mothers, who would pay to give their children to “Baby Farmers.” In a way, the proper operation of adoption is invented because of the Victorian Era. The execution of “Baby Farming” aimed to help children to become adopted by other childless families or to be sold (human trafficking!). Later on, the public found, unwanted children were often murdered by these UNTRAINED “Baby Farmers”.
        This IPN article demonstrates the conditions that the children were put in. The child sketched on the left side of the front page is a three- year- old who was described to be “intelligent beyond his years.” He was therefore appointed to be the “baby ganger” (supervisors of baby workers?) and his job was to “sit up in the middle of the bed with eight other babies around him” and “to keep them quiet.” When “Baby Ganger” is not working, he is “tied in a little chair (he cannot walk) and placed beside the fire.” The illustration shows the three- year- old falling over into the fire where his arm was burnt. Behind him are the seven crying babies under no supervision and one baby who had fallen off the bed.
        The illustration on the right side of the front page shows a nine- month- old infant being placed into hot water. The article explains that the seventeen- year- old nurse who the baby was given to was untrained and “unfit” to take care of the infant. After placing the DECEASED in the hot water, the baby screamed, but she continued pouring the water. This nurse then wiped the baby with a towel where another nurse then commented, “Thou art rubbing all the skin off” (peeling a tomato?!).
        In Shulamith Firestone’s “Down With Childhood” excerpts from The Dialectic of Sex, the 1970 piece explains a “shared oppression” (237) bond that children and women share. Firestone points to the ways women and children are excluded from the privileged world of men. For children, to be more specific, they are treated as if they “were a species different not just in age, but in kind, from adults” (243). Children described here are dehumanized, as children are in this IPN article. Those babies and children are treated as objects being tied to chair, being left uncared for, being washed inattentively, being killed.