Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America by Felicity M. Turner
• Miriam Rich

Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America. By Felicity M. Turner. Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 228. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6970-0; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6969-4.)

In Proving Pregnancy: Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America, Felicity M. Turner offers a compelling and innovative examination of infanticide cases in the nineteenth-century United States. Turner persuasively identifies knowledge and authority as key themes in this history, revealing how suspected infanticide cases implicated competing assertions of control over knowledge about bodies and reproduction. Turner frames “[k]nowledge of pregnancy and child birth” as “a form of personal property” that initially belonged to women (p. 8). She argues that this property was later claimed by white male professionals as part of a broader late-nineteenth-century assertion of medical and legal authority over women’s bodies.

The opening chapters focus on investigations of infanticide in the first half of the nineteenth century. Turner shows that early-nineteenth-century inquests reflected a widespread recognition of women’s (particularly midwives’ and older married women’s) expertise in the examination and interpretation of bodies and childbearing, though this recognition was modulated by hierarchies of race, class, and familial position. Turner details how white and Black [End Page 422] women of varying social and legal statuses participated in investigations of infanticide. While white male physicians also participated in antebellum inquests, they did not hold exclusive authority. The middle chapters shift the focus to broader cultural and political meanings of infanticide. The third chapter charts how competing antebellum narratives of infanticide were deployed both to oppose and to defend slavery, while the fourth chapter explores how popular and legal rhetoric cast infanticide “as a crime associated with Blackness” in the Reconstruction era (p. 106). The last chapters examine the ascendancy of professional medical authority in later nineteenth-century legal settings, exploring how infanticide investigations increasingly privileged “the expertise of white male medical professionals” on matters of pregnancy and childbearing (p. 133). The final chapter analyzes Reconstruction-era assertions of medical authority over the interpretation of women’s bodies and minds.

Turner’s archival source base prominently includes nineteenth-century coroners’ inquests and court cases, primarily from Connecticut and North Carolina. These legal records are supplemented by sources from across the nineteenth-century United States, including newspaper articles, pamphlets, and medical literature. Turner reads these sources in impressively robust and nuanced ways, providing vivid and granular insight into how individuals experienced and interpreted pregnancy, childbearing, and infant death in shifting nineteenth-century contexts. She offers a richly multidimensional rendering of this material, attentive to domains of sensory and embodied experience in addition to more abstract legal, social, and political contexts.

The book’s central framing of knowledge as property both facilitates and at times constrains intriguing avenues of analysis. Turner uses this framework to bring together critical questions of law, medicine, gender, race, reproduction, and the body in her expansive and multifaceted analysis. Yet even with Turner’s notable efforts to offer nuance and to enlarge conventional notions of property, the analytic of property does not always do justice to the full scope of the book’s material. The book’s richly detailed vignettes of nineteenth-century infanticide cases, interspersed throughout the chapters, skillfully portray on-the-ground processes of knowledge production as collective, dynamic, and diffuse. Even when attributed to a particular individual, knowledge of the body was made and remade through a dense array of social, political, material, and environmental relationships and interactions. But by positioning knowledge as an object owned by a discrete individual or group, the knowledge-as-property framework tends to constrict possibilities for analyzing knowledge of the body as relational and in flux, even as it points toward meaningful new approaches to the legal and intellectual history of property.

Overall, Proving Pregnancy makes a valuable contribution to the literature on gender, law, medicine, and reproduction in U.S. history. It will be of interest to scholars and students across...