How All-Female ‘Juries of Matrons’ Shaped Legal History

Pelican Press · July 8, 2024

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How All-Female ‘Juries of Matrons’ Shaped Legal History

An 18th-century illustration of a jury of matrons

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For more than 700 years, women in England could avoid the ****** penalty just by virtue of being pregnant. A pregnant woman sentenced to ****** would receive a stay of ********** until the baby was born. This tactic was called “

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” and often resulted in the ****** sentence being reduced to a less severe penalty once the pregnancy was over.

Of course, anyone can say they’re pregnant without actually being with child. So how did courts determine whether the claim was true?

Until the early 20th century, it was standard practice to assemble all-female juries, called “

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,” to determine whether a woman was pregnant and could therefore avoid hanging for capital offenses.

Exploring the history of these juries reveals how the roles of women in our legal systems have changed over time. It also shows a shift in beliefs about who is an expert on the female body—and who gets to make decisions about women’s lives.

Pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read both pleaded the belly, though it’s unclear whether they were actually pregnant.

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Highly regarded medical experts

All-female juries existed as early as 1140 in England and persisted until

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. Their role in the courts was highly regarded. They were

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. If they found the woman was “

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” (pregnant), their findings were not disputed.

In addition to determining whether a woman was pregnant, these juries helped evaluate inheritance claims, examined women to determine whether they bore the physical marks of

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and decide whether women accused of infanticide had

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. They provided expert medical testimony for the courts but were not necessarily midwives.

These jurors were respectable, law-abiding women, similar to their male counterparts. Serving on a jury was a high-status privilege. Evidence suggests that an

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of matrons existed in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1433 to 1435. They held an appointed position in the court.

Australia’s first civilian jury

All-female juries also existed in colonial America, as well as in Australia and

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. In fact, the first use of the English jury system in Australia was a jury of matrons.

In 1789,

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was found guilty of stealing items of clothing. This theft was a capital offense. She “pleaded the belly,” and a jury of matrons was convened to assess her claims. After examining Davis, the elderly forewoman

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, “Gentlemen, she is as much with child as I am.” Her plea unsuccessful, Davis became the first woman hanged in Australia.

Another notable example of pleading the belly was Elizabeth McGree in South Australia. In 1882, she was charged with ******** one ********** Renderup. The “powerfully built man” had been drinking with McGree’s husband the evening before the *******, a newspaper

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. After the husband passed out ******, the man left the house, only to return in the early hours of the next morning.

A 1902 cartoon imagining women’s expressions when serving as jurors

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McGree

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that Renderup burst into the house and attempted to ***** her. A struggle broke out, and McGree—perhaps aided by her husband, who was also charged with *******—gained the upper hand against her assailant. Witnesses said that Renderup promised not to “do it again,” but McGree simply replied, “You would have murdered me if you could.” Authorities identified Renderup’s battered body later that day.

Because McGree offered two conflicting accounts of the *******, the jury

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much of her testimony, and the judge sentenced both her and her husband to hang. Once found guilty, she pleaded the belly, and a jury of matrons was called to the court. They determined she was quick with child, and she dodged the

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. She later gave birth to her child in Gladstone Prison. Her ****** sentence was commuted to ten years.

If a convicted woman’s pregnancy resulted in a birth, a reprieve from the noose was fairly common. This raised the concern among men that women might falsely plead the belly to avoid punishment for a capital offense. They worried a jury of matrons, being “naturally” sympathetic to women, might grant the guilty a reprieve from ******.

While there is scant evidence that this was the case, to address the men’s concern, the laws around pleading the belly stipulated that such a plea could only be

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. If a pregnant woman was granted a reprieve from ****** to have the baby, she could be ********* for any future ******—even if pregnant at the time.

Women registering for jury duty in Portland in 1912

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Women “too irrational” for courts

By the late 1800s, suspicion that juries of matrons were “soft” and that the convicted were abusing the belly plea merged with concerns that women were “too irrational, too burdened by suckling infants, too ********* ignorant or too easily corrupted by ******* knowledge” to have a role in courts, wrote legal scholar

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for

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in 2021.

These concerns, along with the

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and the invention of the

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, shifted the balance of power away from juries of matrons and toward male medical officers.

Who had expert knowledge of the female body shifted. Prior to this point, women determined whether the fetus was alive by examining the mother and feeling for signs of fetal movement or “

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,” which was considered the moment the fetus became animated with a soul, and thus fully human.

Now, the stethoscope could detect a fetal heartbeat. This was considered a more

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of establishing pregnancy.

The jury of matrons disappeared from Australia’s courts. It was only in 1997 that women in Australia won “the same rights as men to sit on juries across all states,” Simmonds writes for the

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. Progress, in terms of female representation, is rarely linear.

Juries of matrons were an extraordinary example of women having an

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in a justice system otherwise dominated by men. The examples of women pleading the belly provide a glimpse into the roles and interactions women had in Australia’s early legal systems.

This article is republished from the

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under a Creative Commons license. Read the

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.

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is a criminologist at the University of Newcastle in Australia. A 2024 fellow for the History Council of South Australia, she is also the co-founder of the Newcastle Migration Research Network.

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#AllFemale #Juries #Matrons #Shaped #Legal #History

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How All-Female ‘Juries of Matrons’ Shaped Legal History

Highly regarded medical experts

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