Prelims

Half Title Page

THE CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT OF MATERNAL INFANTICIDE

Title Page

THE CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CONTEXT OF MATERNAL INFANTICIDE: A CRYING BABY AND THE INABILITY TO ESCAPE

BY

MARTHA SMITHEY

Texas Tech University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2019

Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-78754-208-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-327-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-951-1 (Epub)

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the babies whose heart-breaking stories help us understand the serious consequences of cultural and economic inequality of women.

For Mom, Marilyn, Hershel, and Luis – the significant forces that shape my life.

List of Figures

List of Tables

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long-time coming. In many ways, I have shaped and reshaped my seminal work on infanticide in my dissertation at Texas A&M University as I expanded my research into new areas of understanding mothering, the consequences of inequality, and violence. I am deeply grateful to Howard B. Kaplan for successfully guiding me through the application and subsequent expectations of a pre-doctoral fellowship from The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA Award#5F3-DA05463). His teaching and mentoring challenged and inspired me. I am also very grateful to Ben Crouch, Jane Sell, and Alex McIntosh for their support and insights as they shepherded me through my dissertation at Texas A&M University.

From there, I want to thank my colleagues at the University of Texas at El Paso for their support as I continued my work on infanticide and mothering. A special thanks to Howard Daudistel, Kathy Staudt, Roy Malpass, and Andrew Giacomazzi for their friendship and encouragement. I want to also thank Bernard Auchter at the National Institute of Justice who always supported and encouraged my research for this and other projects.

A sincere thank you to Susanne E. Green for a lifelong friendship and to whom I know I can turn to whenever I feel overwhelmed.

My colleagues at Texas Tech University gave me the support and academic space to organize years of work into this book. I want to give a special thanks to Tamra Walter for the years of friendship, support, and much-needed laughter about academia and life in general.

Finally, I wish to thank my family for their love and patience as I made extra demands on them while struggling with the research and writing. Their love and support is the motivation for all I do in my life. Raising my son, Hershel, has taught me more about the reality of mothering than anything I have studied or heard. He is an amazing person and, despite my frequent fumbling through motherhood, has become the most humane and caring person I know. He is the work about which I am most proud. My husband and colleague, Ignacio Luis Ramirez, is the perfect life partner for me. His love, sense of adventure, and insights into my life at home and work are invaluable.