About 50 University of Michigan students, faculty and community members gathered in Jeffries Hall Wednesday evening to hear Kate Masur, Northwestern University professor of history, tell the story of 19-year-old Olive Ash. Ash lived in Sutton, Vt. and died in 1858 after undergoing a medical procedure for an abortion. Masur took Ash’s story as part of her new archival research, focusing on the intersection between gender, patriarchy and the legal interpretation of women’s reproductive rights in 19th-century New England.
In her talk, Masur said William Howard, the practitioner who conducted Ash’s abortion, was found guilty in 1859, despite his appeal that the fetus had died prior to the procedure, by the Vermont Supreme Court for violating an 1846 statute. The statute criminalized abortion and punished practitioners who completed the procedure when there was not a severe health concern for the pregnant person.
Masur said the interpretation of the statute reflected a perpetuation of traditional gender norms regarding women’s role in society and prevented abortion from becoming a safe, accessible procedure. According to Masur, Chief Justice William Rehnquist believed allowing access to abortion would encourage women to avoid their prescribed roles as child bearers and mothers.
“This chief justice said the statute was not about protecting the fetus. The statute was about women,” Masur said. “So, in sum, the continued life of the fetus is not essential for the perpetration of the offense, and what mattered most was using interpreting the law as an effort to protect women’s lives and their reproductive capacity, and making sure that women acted in conformity with the gender social norms of the time.”
Masur said she analyzed the case of Olive Ash and the subsequent trial of State v. Howard because she wanted to better understand reproductive rights on a local level to gain insight into what life was like for women in the 19th century.
“I zero in on events in 1858 and 1859, and in some ways it feels right to think about questions of women’s bodies and women’s opportunities on such a small, intimate scale because that’s the scale on which they were most often lived,” Masur said.
In the lecture, Masur also highlighted the stories of other women such as Laura Furhnam, who produced a magazine called the Literary Review, and Mary Ann Wilson, who pursued an education at Bradford Academy. She said she spotlighted them as examples of women who lived in Bradford, Vt. and did not adhere to the established norms of women’s responsibilities and duties.
“Even in Bradford, within the many constraints they face, women refuse the terms established for them by the history and traditions of patriarchy,” Masur said. “Laura Farnham and her Literary Review exemplify that, and so evidently did Mary Ann Wilson, the daughter of the globe-maker, born in Bradford in 1814. She had attended Bradford Academy, married at age 29 (and) was in her 40s when Olive Ash died.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily before the event, Emily Prifogle, co-director of the Program in Race, Law, and History at the Law School and organizer of the event, said she believes it is important to learn about the evolution of modern legal systems to better understand the intersection between law and history.
“I think legal history is important because I think that the law structures the way we all interact with each other, and the history of how that system of law came to be tells us how we got here today and how the inequalities we experience the triumphs of justice,” Prifogle said. “I think that’s really fun to study and also has important relevance for policymakers today too.”
Rackham student Levity Smith, who attended the lecture, said in an interview with The Daily he enjoyed the way Masur told a story through historical documents and maps.
“It was really helpful, methodologically, to see how she tells a story with these old documents,” Smith said. “(Seeing) a picture of the place where the law was made sort of makes it feel very real and like a true story.”
In an interview with The Daily following her talk, Masur said she hopes attendees can walk away understanding how nuanced history is and acknowledge the broader history of women’s reproductive rights in the United States.
“There’s a history to the moment we’re living in now,” Masur said. “Think about issues of reproductive rights and the situation post-Dobbs in the United States. …There’s a history to this whole moment, and what I was talking about today was like one little slice of that history.”
Daily Staff Reporter Claudia Minetti can be reached at cminetti@umich.edu.