Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
“… Another story emerges, however, from these understandings of capacity, ordinary transfers of property, and marriage. Knitting together the legal and medical backstories of nearly three dozen state and federal appeals cases offers a new framework not only for understanding the broader development of female citizenship in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, but also the early ideological foundations of the birth control movement. Triangulating court cases, medical and medical jurisprudence texts, legal treatises, and the writings of feminist reformers illustrates that that the positioning of women as able and productive citizens in the realm of contract translated to the women’s movement’s fight for the right to bodily autonomy, and, by extension, the right to control their fertility. Although legal and women’s historians have explored the history of the marriage contract and women’s property, less attention has been paid to how changes in medical jurisprudence may have impacted arguments for voluntary motherhood and bodily freedom. Similarly, historians of medicine have not extensively considered how concomitant developments in the law challenged medical theory and elevated the ideals of contract over diagnoses of capacity …” (more)

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Lauren Macivor Thompson, “‘The Reasonable (Wo)man’: Physicians, Freedom of Contract, and Women’s Rights, 1870–1930′, Law and History Review, Volume 36, Issue 4, November 2018, pp 771-809, https://doi.org/10.1017/S073824801800041X. Published online: 27 December 2018.

First posted 2019-01-03 13:22:09