Broadmoor's Early ‘Pleasure Women’, or the Somatechnics of Maternal Filicide in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Drawing on primary and secondary sources including Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum patient files (specifically for the years 1863–1874), trial notes, newspaper reports, medical treatises, parliamentary debates, government reports, and juridical texts, this paper offers a critical genealogy of what we identify as the key somatechnologies that contributed to the gathering together, for the first time in British history, of a large number of women who murdered (or attempted to murder) their offspring in a purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane. Our analysis offers a (necessarily partial) mapping of the dispositif – that is, the ‘thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble … of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions' ( Foucault 1980b : 194) – that we contend engendered a culturally- and historically-specific configuration of the maternal filicide that thoroughly saturated the lives of women on whom this study is based.