Bodies of Evidence: What Women Lost to Modern Medicine | Felicity Turner | Proving Pregnancy

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 00:02
Hello and welcome to the Clio Dialogues, the podcast that links history with the present to help us better understand the world we live in today. I am your host, Jennifer Robin Terry. 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 00:14
When I began this, I was like, I'm not writing a book about abortion. This has nothing to do with abortion. There really is an overlap. And the kind of issues they were talking about in terms of controlling women's bodies, particularly after the Civil War, we're still talking about that today. 
 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 00:29
My guest today is Dr. Felicity M. Turner, Associate Professor of History at Georgia Southern University. She is the author of Proving Pregnancy: Gender Law and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth Century America, published by the University of North Carolina Press. 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 00:43
The following conversation references historical cases of infanticide. Listener discretion is advised. 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 00:50
Welcome, Felicity. I am so glad that you could join me here on the Clio Dialogues.

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 00:57
Well, thank you, Jennifer, for having me. I really appreciate your interest and I'm looking forward to talking with you.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 01:02
On the surface, your book, Proving Pregnancy, is about infanticide in the 19th century. But you actually use these infanticide cases as a lens to look at a larger story about women's authority, about medical knowledge, and about the law. We're going to get into that in a minute, but I thought that perhaps you could take us back to 1624. Essentially, that English statute that became an American law.

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 01:31
Okay, so the English statute basically set in stone, if you like, the kind of women who could be charged with this crime of what was actually known as concealment. The shorthand was infanticide. That's what it came to be known as, the infanticide statute. But the actual crime was concealing birth. So I like to think of it as keeping a secret. All right. So birth was meant to be public in the sense that not everybody's coming in and watching, but that people knew that somebody had had a child. They knew who both parents were. And so women who gave birth in secret, that was the crime. And so what's unusual about the statute is it only applied to single women, so unmarried women. So that would be widows and women who are not married. And it did not require a corpse for a successful prosecution. And this is really unusual, even today. If you want to prove that a homicide has occurred, usually you need a corpse. You  know,  that's the main form of evidence. It's very hard for a prosecutor to prove that a crime of murder has occurred without the body. And so this was different. This was like, we think you have been pregnant, you've subsequently given birth, and you have hidden the body. The crime was keeping the secret. And this explains the kind of evidence that came forward in infanticide cases. Now, by the time you get to the ones that I'm looking at, actually, I would say 99% of the time there actually was a corpse. There was an infant's corpse, and that's what motivated the investigation. But in the 17th century, it was quite different.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 03:14
Why would women conceal pregnancy?

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 03:18
Women would conceal pregnancy because they were unmarried, they were unwed, or they may have been sexually assaulted. So, particularly in England, one of the reasons might have been that a lord may have impregnated a servant girl. So this was the context in which the crime often was tried. It was particularly important there, and this is why the statute kind of came into being, because those members of the peerage wanted to keep track of all their bastards. That's not a word I like using, but they wanted to keep track of them. That's why they didn't want these servant girls or other women concealing birth. They wanted to know who these people were. The context's a little different in the American colonies and what would later be the United States. So in the United States, mostly it's because they're unwed and they  don't want people to know. This came up a number of times, that they've had a relationship of some sort with an African American, for example, particularly in the South, which is where I did a lot of my research, but also with a free black in the Northeast, they want to hide those kind of relationships or with somebody who was married. So that part of it carried over from England into the United States.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 04:27
Can you give us a few examples of some of the women who were tried for concealment?

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 04:34
Most women don't end up being tried. Most women are investigated. So at this initial process, which is the inquest, a lot of women are investigated. They may then be bound over for trial by that. The justice of the peace says, okay, there's enough evidence here for this woman, based on the findings of the inquest, to turn up at court day, the court meets, and there would be a grand jury who would hear the evidence at that point in time, and they would say, we don't think there's enough evidence here to proceed to trial. So it takes a number of steps for a case to reach a trial. So there's a very small number. But one of my favorites, and I've been thinking about her a lot recently, is this woman known as Elizabeth Beaver. And her case did make it to trial, and so it did go through all of these steps, and she was actually tried, and they eventually found her not guilty. And we don't know why. Just as today, we have no idea what goes on inside the jury room. What seems to be clear from the evidence is that there was an enslaved man involved with her. She was a white woman from North Carolina. This is about 1811. Whether he was the father of the child, whether he helped her conceal the child, it's unclear. But he gets charged at the same time that she does. We never know what happens to his case, largely because, in cases involving enslaved people, very few of them ever make it to trial. Because it's not necessarily in the interests of the enslaver to have their enslaved person tried for a crime like this. They don't want them found guilty. They want the enslaved person to continue working for them. And so that's the process that she went through in terms of going through this inquest. There were women involved who inspected her body. That was a process that involves squeezing her breasts, looking at her abdomen. There were male witnesses that talked about finding the corpse. There were white men who identified as doctors that testified at the inquest, and they talked about what they thought about whether or not she'd been pregnant, but they were just talking in broad terms. Well, we saw her walking through the town, and she looked like she was pregnant, but they didn't do this investigation that the women did. Another case in Connecticut, because that was another state where I worked, involved a free black woman. This was around about the same time period. Her name was Clarissa Oakry, and this was a tragic case in many ways. She worked as a servant. She was also tried. And at the point in time when that happened, Connecticut still had the death sentence for the crime. And so she was found guilty, sentenced to death. And that time you could petition the General Assembly in Connecticut for a commutation of the death sentence, which is what she received. So Connecticut's unusual. Most other states you had to petition the governor, but in Connecticut, it was a General Assembly. So they petitioned the General Assembly. Her death sentence was commuted to a sentence in jail, but she didn't last very long in jail. She died shortly thereafter. So for some women, their sentences were commuted and they were able to go back into the community. But that definitely didn't happen so much with black women. They face harsher consequences.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 07:47
In cases like these in the early 19th century, women played a large role in the process of testifying, of proving pregnancy. What were women's roles in the early 19th century before the Civil War?

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 08:00
Women played a key role. And that's a really important part of my argument in this book. Men didn't really know much about pregnancy. And men weren't really generally allowed in birthing rooms. So all the knowledge that people in the community had about pregnancy that's known by women generally. Such as the case of Elizabeth Beaver I talked about, they basically did the investigations, these close physical examinations of accused women's bodies. So the inquest jury that I mentioned was always comprised of white men, always. But in order to make any recommendation or to reach any finding, they relied upon the evidence of a lot of people, but women were key to that because they couldn't look at women's bodies and neither could male doctors. And so, in terms of speculating about whether or not someone had been pregnant, it really helped to have somebody who could say, Well, we've looked at the body and we've seen the stretch marks effectively, and we can see that the breasts are leaking milk. These are the reasons that we think this woman has recently been pregnant. And we know, because we're experienced with pregnancy, we've had babies ourselves, or in many cases, some of them were midwives. And so this may bring to mind the classic example that I think many historians certainly know, but beyond that, even the broader public of the midwife in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's famous book, A Midwife's Tale.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 09:26
One of the central arguments of your book is that knowledge of the human body functioned as a form of property. That's fascinating and it's rather abstract because we are used to the idea of property as being something tangible that you can hold or touch. So, what did that mean to possess this knowledge? And what does this mean that this knowledge is property, and in particular for women who this knowledge is property?

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 09:50
So essentially the argument I'm making is that when historians go back and look at the sources and they're looking for the property that women owned, what we look for is tangible property. And this is valuable, but it's also in some ways limiting because women could, in many ways, not own that kind of property during that period of time. But if we expand our understandings of what constituted property and understand that ideas about property were far more fluid, people didn't necessarily think of it as something tangible that you could lay claim to, then we can see that actually white women, enslaved people, free black women, so people we usually assume as marginalized from property holding in particularly the early period, the pre-Civil War period, were able to make claims to owning property in much broader ways than we might think. It allows us to see a much broader universe in which people we think of as marginalized from power were able to make claims to respectability, authority, legitimacy. So because these white women who testified at these inquests possess this knowledge, and I use the word possessed very deliberately, they held authority and legitimacy and respect in their communities. So it's a very different idea of what we think of as property in some ways. It's this much more pluralistic. I use this term sort of plural possession. It's this idea of shared possession. Today, doctors own that kind of knowledge, but it's attached to this particular tangible thing, which is a license to practice. So the same knowledge circulates today, and it is considered property. If a doctor loses their license, that's a valuable loss. We do consider that a form of property, but it's the license itself which is the property. And so that's what I trace actually is how does this broadly shared knowledge that's shared by a wide range of people, how does it become knowledge that becomes attached to just this one thing, the medical license? And why do they do that? 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 11:58
And this happens through the 19th century, so that by the time we get to the end of the 19th century, medicine has become professionalized. And so this property is held in fewer hands.

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 12:10
Yeah, that's basically the process. And in the early 20th century, there's a report done by a man by the name of Abraham Flaxner, and he investigates all the medical schools in the United States and reaches a series of conclusions about what medical schools should have of the kind of medical education they should provide. What this report leads to is the closure of a large number of schools that provide medical education to white women, African Americans, and Jewish people. So that most of the schools that remain open are specifically for white men.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 12:42
So they're essentially deemed not credentialed or accredited, like a university would be today, accredited. 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 12:48
Yes. 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 12:49
Your book complicates the familiar story that male doctors deliberately pushed women out of medicine in the 19th century by saying that these male physicians were competing with other male physicians and with lawyers and medical practitioners to be deemed those who have this knowledge, but women became casualties of that. Am I getting this correct? 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 13:13
Yeah. So I think that in some ways that part of the book has become the most controversial. Okay.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 13:19
Interesting. 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 13:20
What I would say is that after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, there's a much greater shift towards rights, a growth in rights, right? So the civil rights, voting rights, so that's where women's focus shifts to, right? They are completely locked out of voting rights at the federal level. And so there's this greater focus on rights. But what this means in part is that women become more focused on getting an expanding set of rights, and they lose sight of the fact that, well, actually, they've had all these claims to property in the past that they just didn't really realize they had. So as they go pursuing different types of rights, more concrete rights, rather than these abstract ones, as you talked about, they kind of lose sight of the abstract stuff. And so that's not necessarily their fault. I mean, I obviously was pleased that women chased after voting rights, but the problem was they let men define the set of rights that matter and define what property meant. And so for that reason, they lost sight of the property they already had. And then in relation to your question about there's a lot of competition, yes, definitely. I've been thinking about this again recently because I was writing a piece about how the shift toward professionalization happened in North Carolina in the 19th century amongst doctors. They start this process actually very early, before the Civil War. They pass legislation in order to do it. But even after the Civil War, it becomes very complicated. So they're kind of like, okay, we're the ones that have the authority. And local people, the communities in which they interact are like, yes, you certainly have more authority than you used to have, but you're still not be all and end all. So doctors are still negotiating all the time what I would call pluralistic understandings of who possesses medical knowledge. You know, people on the ground are like, well, okay, I'm still gonna listen to the guy who fixes my horses to help me with my broken arm because that person's there and they're cheaper. So this is a really long and slow process. Doctors were definitely what we would call today medical doctors, qualified doctors, accredited doctors, but that didn't mean that they could make people come to them and use them and accept their knowledge. That that was a really long, slow process. And I think this also explains why they began to try and regulate midwives in the 20th century, because they're like, well, if we force every other healthcare professional to be regulated, then yeah, we limit the healthcare professionals that are available to everyone.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 15:52
So then women in the late 19th century are they listened to less when it comes to these trials for infanticide or these inquests?

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 16:01
Yes, definitely. That's the short answer. Or they're tried themselves. Midwives have tried. 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 16:06
Really? 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 16:06
So we yeah, so uh, what's the easiest way to delegitimate the voice of someone in an infanticide trial, delegitimate the midwife who's been part of the birthing experience? So I begin to see more of that as well. So some of these cases are beyond the period of my book, so I finished at the end of Reconstruction, so about 1880. But once you push into the 1890s, yes, you see more midwives being tried.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 16:30
Does this seem to be an actual, a concerted effort on the part of physicians to elevate their voices and their expertise? 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 16:38
I would probably say yes. Yeah. They're also going after doctors who are not registered. Leslie Reagan in When Abortion Was a Crime, she talked about that as well. You do see that in the South.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 16:48
Part of professionalization is defining who can practice and then going after those who are not fitting those requirements.

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 16:55
Definitely. And it doesn't matter if that midwife or that doctor is actually helping the community. I mean, there are some cases that I've stumbled across with doctors in particular, where it looks like he was slowly poisoning someone, maybe not intentionally, but just really didn't know what he was doing. But other cases where the doctor's been a great help to the community, but they're just, you know, don't have that license. You can't be practicing. Doesn't matter if you've been doing it for 20 years.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 17:23
Another thing that you address towards the end is how physicians are starting to delve into women's mental health in addition to their physical health. And  that was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One, because they're starting to argue that this is why women are not capable of becoming a doctor, is their mental instability. But it's also used in a way to say that women may not be entirely responsible for the crime of infanticide because they are temporarily insane in some way.

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 17:55
It's used to basically discredit women in a lot of ways. They can't be doctors, they can't be lawyers, they can't do a whole lot of professions. So it's part of a broader effort to discredit rising middle class women who are intelligent and capable. But the other thing is, yes, it is used as a way of limiting women's culpability for infanticide, but it's very racialized, it's classed as well. So the way they use it in relation to white women is middle and upper class white women. They sort of talk about them as being of weak mind, of being fragile, of having some kind of trauma after childbirth that leads them to not knowing what they're doing. But when they talk about or refer to black women or poor white women, they use very different language and they refer to them as being, and I'm quoting here, so I'm gonna use quotation marks, "idiots," and they use the word, once again, I'm quoting "dumb," which had very specific meanings at the time. But so these women are less intelligent, and that's why they committed these crimes. And therefore, even though their culpability is reduced, they still have to go to prison. Whereas for white women who are traumatized and have weak minds and have these weaker constitutions, these middle and upper class white women, they're found innocent.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 19:15
So same biology, but at different effects depending on if you're white or black.

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 19:19
Yes, and depending upon your class as well. But also the way this plays out in relation to wealthy white women, and a lot of other scholars have written about this, is this language of disturbed minds is being used to put them in asylums and take away any kind of inheritance they might have, or something like that. So it's part of a broader effort to delegitimize women and strip them of their money and their property. So you know we all come it comes full circle back to property.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 19:52
Are they in actuality referring to premenstrual disorders or postpartum depression, that sort of thing? Or hysteria? Yeah. That was the language they're using at that point in time. So yeah, I think they could have been actually referring to those, but they could also have been making these up. Like we'll just say this woman who's got money and she's doing what she wants. That way, if we do that, we can take our money from her. So yeah. Somewhat like the Salem witch trials, right? 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 20:19
Yes, yes. 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 20:20
We'll call her a witch and convict her, and then the property goes to the town. 

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 20:24
Yes. Exactly. That's a really good analogy. 

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 20:27
In chapter three, you talk about Margaret Garner. Oh, yeah. Who was the inspiration for Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. Can you tell us a little bit about Margaret Garner and why she figures in this story of infanticide?

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 20:40
That's actually really where the book began for me. I'm originally from Australia, and so I did my undergraduate education in Australia. And I remember doing American literature, and I was introduced to Toni Morrison, and my mind was blown. For many years, I carried around this very heavily underlined copy of the book. So even though I graduated as a history major, I always loved American literature, and I always thought I would come back to Beloved in some way in my academic career. And for those who don't know, Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, she based Beloved on the actual story of a woman known as Margaret Garner, who prior to the Civil War was an enslaved woman who escaped from slavery with her four children. And as the enslavers were closing in on her, she slit the throat of one of her children. And I think she had tried to kill another, but she definitely killed one. So this actually sparked at the time a nationwide debate about ending slavery. This was 1856, so it we're getting closer to the Civil War. Abolitionists, so those opposed to slavery, they wanted to have her tried for murder because she was in a free state by then, and so they were like, Well, she won't be returned to slavery, so have her tried for murder in the free state. State, that's a better outcome. Whereas her owner was like, I just want my enslaved person back,  even if she's gone and killed her child. He won because of the fugitive slave law, and he did get her back, and then he eventually sold her and she disappeared. Various historians have written about what eventually happened to her, but there's a point at which she disappears in the historical record. So Toni Morrison was an African-American novelist, she wrote about what might this story look like if I imagined part of it. And so every time I reread that book and I read it again last year, and just discover new things. Um, it's just extraordinary. And so when I originally went into the archives, I was looking for histories of enslaved people who had committed infanticide. What I found was that yes, enslaved people did commit infanticide, but actually far more whites did.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 22:52
Really?

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 22:52
Yeah. Now, let me be clear that there possibly were more enslaved people, and those cases just didn't make it to trial. There weren't investigations, so that shifted in the end of what my book was about. So that's how migrant the history of Margaret Garner relates to this broader project. And it was very important at the time because it really shaped a national narrative about infanticide because abolitionists pitched infanticide as like, well, this is a disease of slavery. They sort of associated it with slavery, but they said, look what's happening. Yes, we know it's happening in white communities. And that's because  it's infecting, you know, they use that kind of language, the whole nation, and that's why we need to get rid of slavery. So it wasn't just about that case that made it a much broader issue. So this kind of backfired, unfortunately, after the Civil War, because then when newspapers, particularly in the South, but even in the Midwest, continued to report on infanticide, they would say, look, African Americans are still committing infanticide. They also reported on white people too, but they said African Americans are still perpetrating infanticide, and slavery's ended. So, hey, this had nothing to do with slavery. They made biologically essentialist arguments about African Americans being more prone to commit or perpetrate infanticide.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 24:13
It led people to make judgments on black women as unfit mothers.

Guest, Felicity M. Turner: 24:18
That kind of language, I think, it resonates today, even. One of the things that fascinates me about this book is that in many ways it remains so relevant. I published it in 2022, but we're in 2026 and we're heading into 2027. It remains relevant today, precisely because of the way in which it conflates with issues related to reproductive justice. When I began this, I was like, I'm not writing a book about abortion. This has nothing to do with abortion. But what I since learned is even though 19th century Americans may have put those crimes into different buckets, the boundaries became very fluid over time, and that there really is an overlap. And the kind of issues they were talking about in terms of controlling women's bodies, particularly after the Civil War, we're still talking about that today. And next year is 2027, which is a hundred years since  the 1927 Buck V Bell decision made sterilization of both women and men legal across the United States. And it's a decision that's never been overturned. And so I think this is telling what Dobbs did, and that will be five years post-Dobbs next year, this Buck V Bell decision, there's still these efforts to control women's bodies. And we see the origins of that in my book. But we also see what it was like when people didn't try and control women's bodies. So looking back to that pre-Civil War period when they were more open and empathetic.

Host, Jennifer Robin Terry: 25:49
To learn more about this and any book featured on the Clio Dialogues, read Clio's book reviews at www.cliodialogues.com. This has been the Clio Dialogues. Please like, follow, and subscribe. And join me again next time because history isn't finished with us.