'[S]he was Convicted and Condemned'

Abstract

This paper traces an archaeology of single motherhood, using the disparate examples of the prosecution of infanticide in early seventeenth-century London and the vilification of welfare-dependent single mothers in contemporary western societies, as presented in SlavojŽižek's analysis of the cultural logic of late Capitalism. The paper addresses the issues of media representations, the medicalisation of birth, and the defining and containing of the single procreative female before the law. These demonised representations are set against the problematic conservative notions of legitimate maternity and 'the family'. It is argued that contemporary stereotypical assumptions around single motherhood in examples from countries that have inherited their codes of justice from the Westminster system have their bases in early modern English culture and law.