Proving Pregnancy
Gender, Law, and Medical Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century America
By Felicity M. Turner

246 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 2 halftones
-
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6970-0
Published: September 2022 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6969-4
Published: September 2022
Gender and American Culture
Paperback Available September 2022, but pre-order your copy today!
Buy this Book
For Professors:
Free E-Exam Copies
Reframing knowledge of the body as property, Felicity M. Turner shows how, at the very moment when the federal government expanded formal civil and political rights to formerly enslaved people, the medical profession instituted new legal regulations across the nation that restricted access to knowledge of the female body to white men.
About the Author
Felicity M. Turner is associate professor of history at Georgia Southern University.
For more information about Felicity M. Turner, visit
the
Author
Page.
Reviews
"Turner shifts our understanding of the nineteenth-century issue of infanticide from a focus solely on criminality and deviancy to a thoughtful gendered intellectual history of property rights."—Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
"Innovative and original. Turner elucidates the underlying legal and cultural dynamics that orchestrated regulation around pregnancy, birth, and infant death, and the implications for how medical knowledge and criminal law developed constitutive authority over women's bodies."—Yvonne Pitts, author of Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky