2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, women across the Americas experienced increased scrutiny over their reproductive lives as modernizing states began criminalizing practices like abortion and infanticide. Underlying these state efforts was the persistence of gendered concepts relegating women to “traditional” roles as wives and mothers. In practice, however, state efforts to prosecute fertility control proved more tenuous. This panel explores the tension between patriarchal gender norms informing the criminalization of fertility control and women’s expanding role in the public sphere in three New World contexts.

Marcela Micucci argues that infanticide commanded substantial public attention in antebellum New York City, as it threatened traditional Victorian models of motherhood. Nevertheless, officials had legal difficulties prosecuting women for the crime. Similarly, in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro, Cassia Roth demonstrates that the Brazilian state often investigated women for abortion and infanticide. Rather than finding them guilty, however, the judicial system dismissed them as hysterical, as no “sane” woman would reject motherhood. In early-twentieth-century Cuba, Bonnie Lucero contends that male Cuban elites attempted to prosecute women’s fertility control to assert political power in the face of U.S. intervention, but they struggled to reconcile the category of “female criminal” with a longstanding view of crime as a male domain.

This panel explores the effects of state criminalization of fertility control on women’s lives. It demonstrates that legal efforts went hand-in-hand with state attempts to reinforce patriarchal ideas of women’s “natural” roles as wives and mothers even as women across the Americas increasingly challenged these notions.