Moral Agency and Personhood of Infants in Medical and Pedagogical Literature of Pre-Darwinian America

In this paper, I investigate conceptualizations of the moral agency and personhood of infants in nineteenth-century American medical and pedagogical texts to disentangle the interweaving of hegemonic religious, scientific, and philosophical conceptions of children and childhood during the nineteenth-century and prior to an evolutionary understanding of child development in the 1860s and the growing mechanisation of the child’s body in the early twentieth-century. During the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, medicine and pedagogy overlapped with one another, with Anglo-American church leaders offering advice on physical health and physicians authoring treatises on the moral precepts for children and mothers. During the mid-to late nineteenth century, medical and religious discourse concerning the moral agency and status of the infant shifts as child-rearing and motherhood become more ‘scientific’ and specialized and a sort of fragmentation of the infant, a separation of the physical, mental, and moral features of the child and discourse of the moral agency of infants wanes. Through a textual analysis and interrogation of child-rearing manuals of the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, I consider how various authorities of child-rearing define and conceptualize morality, agency, infancy, and personhood and how conceptualizations of the infant persist or change particularly during major political and scientific moments, such as the emergence of the new republic in the mid-to-late eighteenth century and the inauguration of Darwinism in the mid-nineteenth century.