The Winton Baby-Farmer

On 12 August 1895 Minnie Dean was hanged; the only woman ever executed in New Zealand.

Dean was a "baby-farmer", a role that grew out of Victorian attitudes to illegitimacy. Having a child out of wedlock was seen as ruining the life of a respectable girl, blighting any chance of a good marriage. A baby-farmer could make the problem discreetly disappear, by taking the child off its mother's hands.