Race, Gender, and Infanticide: Exploring Black Women and Criminal Justice in Early Twentieth-Century Philadelphia

In this paper, I will explore prison and court documents related to the case of Henrietta Cook, a young, single African-American domestic worker in early twentieth-century Philadelphia who was tried and acquitted of infanticide.  The account of Cook’s encounter with the criminal justice system provides us with the rare voice of a working-class Black woman.  It reveals a window into the ways in which standards of sexual propriety and social respectability reverberated for Black women of poorer backgrounds, as they did for better studied elite African-American women, in the Progressive Era.  My method of making the most of prison records, incomplete transcripts and court papers, and prison administrators’ one-sided observations involves knowledge of the broader historiography, and especially of how race, gender, and sexuality were constructed at the time.  My method also requires empathy for my subject, and careful analysis of these documents as rare texts of impoverished Black women’s voices and experiences.  I find that the seventeen-year-old Cook may have engaged in sexual intercourse in the hopes of attaining respectability through marriage.  When she found herself pregnant, however, she was desperate to retain the appearance of chastity and respectability, attributes that were especially important for Black women who suffered from negative assumptions about their morality.  While on trial, Cook sought to project virtue both as a means to convey legal innocence and as a means to counteract the negative attributes assigned to blackness.  I argue that incarcerated Black women, who were often impoverished domestic workers, share much with Black women as a whole in the early twentieth century as they walked a “tightrope” regarding respectability, sexuality, and reproduction.