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.

中文翻译：

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“理性的（女人）男人”：医生、合同自由和妇女权利，1870-1930

本文考察了 1870 年至 1930 年间妇女权利运动中的契约自由理想如何挑战医学和医学法学理论。在此期间，医学将女性的智力缺陷与根植于她们身体的问题联系在一起。医生认为，生殖疾病和怀孕、分娩、月经和更年期的状况使女性残疾、不理性和天生依赖。然而与此同时，消除隐蔽的法律障碍，以及扩大女性财产和收入权利的新法律，都有助于改变对女性公共角色的看法。法院对财产和合同案件的理智和合理性采用了更为自由的理解，即使法律行为者是女性。抓住这个机会，改革者对医生关于女性“天生的”心理弱点的观点提出了有力的论据，指出越来越多的合同和交易权说明了女性的理性主义和获得完全公民权的能力。最重要的是，这些活动人士坚持认为，这些权利表明了女性拥有完全身体自由的权利——这一概念在早期的节育运动中将变得至关重要。