Content area
Full Text
This article explores women's writings about their pregnant bodies in nineteenth-century America. In an attempt to move beyond the simplistic models of "pregnancy as illness" and "pregnancy as fetal containment," this study explores how women discussed displaying their visibly pregnant bodies in public, kept track of their weights, and described what was growing inside of their expanding bodies. As legal restrictions upon fertility control increased and women's roles narrowed to an intense focus on mothering, women's descriptions of their bodies and what was residing inside them reveal a remarkable variety and fluidity in interpretations of pregnancy. Analyzing the corporeal experience of pregnancy in the nineteenth century alters our understanding of the history of body quantification, the complex process of fetal personification, and the policing of pregnant bodies, while it also forces us to confront our modern view of pregnancy and its connections to bodily control and reproductive ability.
Lucy McKim Garrison was three months pregnant and had already named her child Katherine. Garrison wrote a thank-you note to her in-laws using the voice of her unborn daughter. "Katherine" assured her grandparents that she welcomed the Christmas present of a pair of socks, even though she could not say "that she was suffering from cold feet just at that time." Katherine also sent "a Happy New Year to her kind Grandparents," and expressed her plan to knit them something some future Christmas-a plan that would have to wait because "her fingers [were] not yet her own to do [with] as she please[d]."1
This charming note may strike readers as unsurprising in an early twenty-first century world that uses fetal images in advertising, consults pregnancy websites detailing "baby's" weekly development, and faces an abortion debate that often highlights the similarities between a three-month fetus and a full-term infant. But this letter was written in 1866. In a time long before women could "see" their pregnancies through ultrasounds, or even "know" they were pregnant with the help of a urine test, Lucy Garrison imagined her daughter existing in her body, complete with warm feet and uncontrollable fingers. Ending the letter with her own report that "the child has hardly leftme room for a word, what a talker at so early an age!" Garrison interpreted her pregnant body...