States of Secrecy: Women's Crimes and the Practices of Everyday Life

States of Secrecy: Women's Crimes and the Practices of Everyday Life Mark Jackson. New-Born Child Murder: Women, Illegitimacy, and the Courts in Eighteenth-Century England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. vii + 206 pp. ISBN 0-7190-4607-6 (cl). Stephen R. KandaU. Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. vii + 353 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-674-85360-1 (cl). Katherine Ott. Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. viii + 242 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-674-29910-8 (cl). Leslie J. Reagan. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. viii + 387 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-520-08848-4 (cl). Shurlee Swain with Renate Howe. Single Mothers and Their Children: Disposal , Punishment, and Survival in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ν + 264 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-521-47443-4 (cl). Nancy D. Campbell Why do "secret" or stigmatized practices become visible and articulated political problems when they do? How do women's attempts to govern the circumstances of their lives and particularly their reproductive practices get placed on the public agenda? The shifting patterns of visibility and invisibility of illicit practices have much to tell us about how the circumscription of women's self-governance affects not only institutional responses to "socially problematic behavior" by women, but the conduct of everyday life. Campaigns to redefine laws governing reproduction have been driven by local events, but affect policymaking at the level of the state. Feminist historians have taken up the question of state formation, public policy, and strategies of social management as forces that shape women's lives at an abstract remove. "Bringing the state back in" has had a salutary effect upon the social history of illicit practices, including women's use of illicit drugs, abortion, and infanticide. The studies under review are careful to clarify state definitions that impinge upon how women conduct their everyday lives, but they focus primarily upon records, accounts, and oral histories that document the practical negotiations among women, significant persons such as parents, partners, or © 1998 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 10 No. 3 (Autumn) 1998 REVIEW ESSAY: NANCY D. CAMPBELL 205 members of the "helping professions," and agents of the state, including judges, juries, court recorders, medical practitioners, social workers, and the police. Narratives about women's law-breaking typically fall into two admittedly ahistorical categories: stories that emphasize individual women's moral failings and degraded circumstances; and stories that contextualize women's UUcit practices within the larger structures and forces of women's subordination. Take the frequently cited 1986 case of Pamela Rae Stewart, who was charged with criminal lack of child support under a California state law for engaging in acts contrary to her doctor's orders during the late stages of pregnancy.1 Upon first telling, Stewart's story appears to be one of a woman's stubborn refusal to abstain from the use of illicit drugs and sexual intercourse. The second telling of the story emphasizes the unseen contexts in which Stewart's brutal relationship with her husband took place: women's vulnerability in marriage to economic dependency, marital rape, and often pervasive physical violence directed at them and their children. As legal scholar Michelle Oberman explains in her account of the Stewart case, the reader's emotional and political responses to these multiple and conflicting truths are conditioned upon the interpretive frameworks s/he brings to bear upon the comprehension of women's actions and agency. "Perhaps only Mrs. Stewart knows the real truth of what happened to her on the day she delivered, of how she felt when she was hemorrhaging , of why she waited to seek care. But from a broader perspective, obtaining that particular truth is relatively unimportant. A more significant task for those of us who deal with social and legal policy is to understand the context in which she lived, because, to the extent that her actions were responsive to her environment, were inevitable and perhaps even rational , similar actions will be repeated over and over again by women like her."2...