The Limits of Freedom and Reproductive Control in Postemancipation Virginia

While convictions in cases of infanticide remained exceptional in postemancipation Virginia, a small but significant number of women faced both conviction and punishment. The state imposed the most extreme punishments (death sentences and penitentiary incarceration) only on Black women and girls. Drawing on court records, coroner’s reports, medical literature, and popular media, this paper reconstructs and contextualizes the story of Phillis Douglas, a young, Black, woman convicted of killing her newborn infant and sentenced to sixteen years in prison in 1869. The story of Douglas’s conviction, incarceration, and release provides insights into the larger question of how the legal revolution of Reconstruction affected the moral economy of reproduction in the United States. The paper contends that Douglas’s fate was the product of both highly local dynamics and larger national struggles over the meaning of reproductive freedom in the wake of emancipation and the creation of Constitutional guarantees of citizenship and equal protection. The paper highlights three developments that shaped legal responses to infanticide in the postemancipation South: Black women’s struggle to claim reproductive freedom, northern feminists’ demands for civil equality, and the national campaign to criminalize abortion. While other scholars have drawn on the concepts of social control and resistance to productively analyze infanticide as a historical phenomenon, this essay favors moral economy for its ability to bring into view the complex concerns that shaped Americans’ responses to perceived infanticides while keeping economic dimensions in view. The paper considers the moral visions of women accused of infanticide as well as those guiding medical reformers’ efforts to blur distinctions among menstrual regulation, abortion, and infanticide. The essay ultimately argues that the disproportionate punishment of Black women and girls reveals the limits of Reconstruction’s legal revolution and the influence of defendants’ identity on their treatment both inside and outside the court.