Abstract
This essay examines the theory of maternal impressions, the belief that a woman’s experiences or emotions during pregnancy could explain congenital disability or emotional/ behavior differences in her child and asks why this theory circulated as an explanation for disability seen at birth by both medical doctors and in literature for far longer than it did across the Atlantic. By presenting examples from nineteenth-century medical literature, popular fiction, maternal handbooks, and two canonical works of literature, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave, I argue that maternal impressions worked to maintain anxiety for women, and particular white women, to ensure they felt responsible if anything was “wrong” with their child. Ultimately, I show how maternal impressions was both an ableist and racialized understanding of inheritance that wouldn’t be discarded until the emergence of eugenics in the early twentieth century.
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Endnotes
1 Ronald Numbers documents that scientists began receiving copies of Origin of the Species in the last days of 1859 (30). He tracks how although the initial response among natural scientists to Darwin was tepid, by the end of the 1870s most were converted to his argument (24).
2 For other examples, see Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb, 23-24.
3 While arguing in 1897 that maternal impression could be explained as an “occult influence” might seem bizarre to contemporary readers, as recently as 1860 the Harvard botanist Asa Gray, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, began publically questioning whether supernatural phenomenon could explain patterns in life (Numbers 48).
4 For more on the popular reception of this novel see Alice Fahs’ The Imagined Civil War. She cites that it’s believed that 6,000 copies of Peculiar were published and circulated in the northern United States.
5 According to the Mayo Clinic, the symptoms of a molar pregnancy at first resemble those of a healthy pregnancy. Eventually, most, but not all, women experience some vaginal bleeding and severe nausea and vomiting. Of course, these are also symptoms that some women have during pregnancies that lead to full-term, living babies so it’s impossible to know whether what Hutchinson experienced was out of the ordinary for her last pregnancy.
6 See Dana-Ain Davis’s Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy and Immature Birth (2019) for more on this history and how it extends to racism on maternity wards today.
7 Versions of this guide continued to be published until 1905 with different titles.
8 The University of Rochester’s Atwater bibliography of popular medicine confirms the book’s popularity. The first edition sold out in two weeks, and was issued three more times in 1869, at least eleven times in the 1870s, nine times in the 1880s, and three times in the 1890s. See An Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform 2001, 87.
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Weingarten, K. From Maternal Impressions to Eugenics: Pregnancy and Inheritance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.. J Med Humanit 43, 303–317 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09667-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-020-09667-x