Governmentality and the maternal body: infant mortality in early twentieth-century Lancashire

In an empirical extension of and theoretical commentary on Foucault's work on governmentality, this paper takes the liberal governance of women, specifically mothers, as its focus. In Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, high infant mortality rates sparked widespread concern. Working-class mothers were blamed for infant deaths and became the target of social intervention. Analysing the knowledge which shaped the understanding of infant death, the paper highlights the geography of the problem and traces the creation of a particular subjectivity: the bad mother. Using the case study of the Bolton School for Mothers in Lancashire, the paper excavates the political rationalities informing infant welfare work. Finding a biopolitical concern for the quality and quantity of the British race at the heart of the work of the Bolton School, the article demonstrates the ways in which the working-class maternal body was appropriated as a tool of population revitalisation. The study also interrogates the practices of control used in infant welfare work and suggests the entanglement of different types of power as characteristic of infant welfare as a regime of biopolitical governance. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.