“The Reasonable (Wo)man”: Physicians, Freedom of Contract, and Women's Rights, 1870–1930

Abstract

This article examines how ideals of contract freedom within the women's rights movement challenged medical and medical jurisprudence theories about women between 1870 and 1930. Throughout this period, medicine linked women's intellectual incapacity with problems rooted in their physical bodies. Doctors opined that reproductive diseases and conditions of pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation, and menopause rendered women disabled, irrational, and inherently dependent. Yet at the same moment, the elimination of the legal disability of coverture, and new laws that expanded women's property and earnings rights contributed to changing perceptions of women's public roles. Courts applied far more liberal understandings of sanity and rationality in property and contract cases, even when the legal actors were women. Seizing this opportunity, reformers made powerful arguments against doctors' ideas of women's “natural” mental weakness, pointing out that the growing rights to contract and transact illustrated women's rationalism and competency for full citizenship. Most significantly, these activists insisted that these rights indicated women's right to total bodily freedom—a concept that would become crucially important in the early birth control movement.

“Let’s Make the Womb Safe Again”: Ethnographic Explorations of White Evangelical Women’s Language of Reproductive Injustice

“…Black women's reproduction, however, was critical in the creation of America as a nation because of slavery, and especially after the formal end of the slave trade. According to historian Dierdre Cooper Owens, the professionalization of physicians in the late nineteenth century influenced and increased the status of obstetric and gynecologists who studied the "conditions" of women and took over the profession from midwives and nurses who took a more grounded and wholistic approach to the practices of pregnancy and birth (Ehrenreich & English, 2010;Thompson, 2018;Cooper Owens, 2017). This greatly affected Black women in particular and contributed to disparities and violence toward them in health care and reproduction, including experimentation on their bodies and systematic genocide in many cases (Cooper Owens, 2017;Weinbaum, 2019).…”