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

For more than 700 years, women in England could avoid the death penalty just by virtue of being pregnant. A pregnant woman sentenced to death would receive a stay of execution until the baby was born. This tactic was called “pleading the belly” and often resulted in the death 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 “juries of matrons,” 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.

Highly regarded medical experts

All-female juries existed as early as 1140 in England and persisted until 1931. Their role in the courts was highly regarded. They were medical experts. If they found the woman was “quick with child” (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 witchcraft and decide whether women accused of infanticide had given birth. 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 official pool 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 New Zealand. In fact, the first use of the English jury system in Australia was a jury of matrons.

In 1789, Ann Davis 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 declared, “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 killing one Christian Renderup. The “powerfully built man” had been drinking with McGree’s husband the evening before the murder, a newspaper reported. After the husband passed out drunk, the man left the house, only to return in the early hours of the next morning.

McGree testified that Renderup burst into the house and attempted to rape her. A struggle broke out, and McGree—perhaps aided by her husband, who was also charged with murder—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 murder, the jury discredited 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 noose. She later gave birth to her child in Gladstone Prison. Her death 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 death.

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

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 sexually ignorant or too easily corrupted by sexual knowledge” to have a role in courts, wrote legal scholar Alecia Simmonds for Inside Story in 2021.

These concerns, along with the rise of medical professionals and the invention of the stethoscope, 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 “quickening,” 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 reliable method 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 Monthly. Progress, in terms of female representation, is rarely linear.

Juries of matrons were an extraordinary example of women having an official role 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 Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Alice Neikirk 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.