The Cultural and Economic Context of Maternal Infanticide: A Crying Baby and an Inability to Escape

Almost every story of maternal infanticide starts with “the baby wouldn’t stop crying”. But the story is more than just bad or mentally ill mothers who “lose it” and lethally assault their baby. The story is about how hard it is to be a good mother in a society where women are expected to raise their children in their spare time and with their spare change. This expectation is grounded in a modern mothering ideology of unclear, overwhelming gender socialized expectations of what good mothers are supposed to be and do and assumes mothers have access to the economic and support resources necessary for this monumental job. The struggle of being a “good mother” is common to all mothers and requires much more time and resources than most mothers have available to them. In today’s society, almost all mothers must have a paying job just to make ends meet. Their job takes up most of their day and leaves little time for the demands of parenting. Gender segregated jobs and economic inequ