From Maternal Impressions to Eugenics: Pregnancy and Inheritance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S.
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From Maternal Impressions to Eugenics: Pregnancy and Inheritance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. Karen Weingarten 1 Accepted: 28 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
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. Keywords Maternal impressions . Inheritance . Pregnancy . Disability . Race . 19th - century American literature How are traits inherited? Or, to rephrase that as a question that animated conversation in the mid-nineteenth-century United States: Are traits even inherited? Today, most people familiar with the most general discoveries of genetics in the last hundred years would answer with an unequivocal yes. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly in the U.S., the concept of inheritance as a physiological phenomenon was under debate. In 1859, Charles Darwin’s book On the Origins of the Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in England, which would come to radically influence theories of inheritance on both sides of the Atlantic. Darwin famously proposed that life, primarily plant and animal life (he excluded human beings in this initial publication), adapts to its environment over successive generations. Or, as Siddhartha Mukherjee succinctly summarizes his argument: “Monster by monster, * Karen Weingarten [email protected]
1
Queens College, City University of New York, 65-30 Kissena Blvd., Queens, NY 11367, USA
Journal of Medical Humanities
evolution advanced” (2016, 38). Mutations large and small eventually lead all living things to change. Yet, Darwin’s earth-shaking theory had one major hole in its conception: how exactly were these changes transmitted? The reigning theories of inheritance in his day insufficiently explained Darwin’s theory of natural selection, causing some leading scientists to question not those theories of inheritance but the foundation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. If Darwin, and those supporting him, had paid closer attention to the work of an obscure Viennese monk named Gregor Mendel, they might have found the evidence they needed. As things happen
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