May Farquharson, the daughter of a wealthy white planter who participated in various reform movements in the island, mentioned, for instance, in 1938 that "there is practically no social stigma attached to the production of an assortment of children by different, and tiffany necklace on sale fathers."68Mary Brown, a mother of three who was charged in June 1912 with the murder of newborn child, was raised by and lived with her grandmother Eliza Hall. Eliza mentioned that each time her granddaughter had told her that she was pregnant, she had "turned her away" and "afterwards through compassion," taken her back.65Johnson's contention that "the keenness to attain some social respectability within the colonial context made some working- class Afro-Jamaicans receptive to the dominant Anglocreole culture."71
Statements by the accused women and their family indicate, then, that lowerclass African Jamaicans valued female chastity as much as the colonial elite. They also illustrate that while most lower-class men and women believed that female sexual purity was hard to achieve therefore accepted, albeit hesitantly, a daughter's illegitimate child(ren), there were also some who regarded a daughter's failure to live up to the ideal as a blemish on their own and their daughter's tiffany ring on sale name. The latter included men and women who were one rung up from the bottom of the social ladder. Rosetta Knapp, who was sentenced to death in June 1906 along with her mother Henrietta for having poisoned her eight-day-old baby, was described as a "decent looking girl" with a "respectable
appearance." This and the fact that she and her mother lived in a house surrounded by a plot of land on which they grew bananas, illustrates that they were slightly better off than most lower-class African Jamaicans.69 Active church members were also keener than other tiffany pendant on sale-class African Jamaicans to see that their daughters lived up to the ideal of female chastity. While her mother Miriam had attended "divine service," Omenta Christie had given birth to a child According to the neighbours, Miriam had helped Omenta to dispose of the child. Miriam, however, firmly denied this claim. In the trial, which took place in May 1926, she stated that she had not seen "any infant or was aware of any."70 Henriette Knapp and Miriam Christie, then, lend support to Moore and
The lawyers and judges agreed with the commentators in the Gleaner it was not just social but also economic stresses that made women kill their children. By economic stresses, however, they meant not the lack of support from the reputed father but the women's tiffany bangle on sale wages. Judge Clark, for instance, asked the jury to express their sympathy for Pauline Hewitt, a young domestic servant from Kingston who was charged in September 1926 with the murder of her newborn child, because she was a "young woman, and one from the country-and one without funds." About fifteen per cent of all African Jamaican women claiming an occupation between 1865 and 1938 were domestic servants.73 Women with little or no education preferred domestic service to plantation work
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