“Knowledge of the human body constituted a form of property as important – or even more important than – the body itself in the nineteenth-century United States” (11). At a time when human bodies were actual tangible property under slavery, historian Felicity M. Turner argues intangible knowledge was also a form of valuable property. At its core, Proving Pregnancy is a call for scholars to recognize knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth as akin to a form of property. To do this, Turner examines infanticide cases in the nineteenth-century United States.
From the American Revolution to the end of Reconstruction, Turner traces how knowledge of women’s bodies shifted from being the purview of women – Black and white, enslaved and free – to being controlled (or owned) by white male physicians. While in the early nineteenth century, male juries privileged the knowledge of women in infanticide inquests, by the end of Reconstruction, juries marginalized women’s knowledge and privileged the expertise of white male physicians. The Civil War marks a key turning point in Turner’s narrative. After the abolition of slavery, Turner argues white men substituted authority over knowledge of the female body for the ownership of actual human bodies. In effect, white males’ direct ownership over female bodies from either slavery or, to a lesser extent, coverture shifted to ownership over the power to define women’s bodies. As African Americans gained freedom as well as civil and political rights on the federal level during Reconstruction, Turner shows how freedom actually brought an increase in Black women convicted and imprisoned for infanticide. This criminalization of Black women allowed the government to paint them as unfit mothers, which in turn bolstered the larger argument that African Americans were unfit for citizenship. Before the Civil War, all women regardless of race had owned valuable property in the form of knowledge of the female body. After the Civil War, white male physicians moved to restrict medical knowledge, usurping a form of property women had always claimed. In this way, Turner argues that Reconstruction “proved a moment of loss as well as liberation” (11). Loss of control over knowledge of the female body cemented women’s status as second-class citizens.