Undone Bodies: Women and Disability in Early America
Jennifer W. Reiss is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Pennsylvania. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in History, from Penn, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and two master’s degrees, in Law and American History, respectively, from the University of Cambridge. Jenny’s research focuses largely on eighteenth-century Britain, British North America, and the early American republic, where she is particularly interested in women and gender, medicine and disability, and legal history.
Her dissertation project rethinks how disability as a social category was constructed and experienced before burgeoning clinical understandings of bodily difference in the antebellum era. Thinking expansively about disability through the lens of womanhood, Undone Bodies brings legal, social, medical, labor, and political histories to bear on the interwoven relationship between gender and ability. It argues that femaleness was inherently disabling in Anglo-American society and thus, gender matters to the conception of impairment in the long eighteenth century. The project seeks to uncover hidden histories of disabled women, but also to question the gendered ways in which we imagine disability in the past.
A former attorney who practiced in New York and London, Jenny has published articles on human rights law, European law, and intellectual property law, including her most recent piece, “Property, Propriety, and Publicity: A Different Look at Pope v. Curll (1741),” which was published with Law & Literature in February 2024. She also has an essay on the experience of disability in the archives forthcoming (Autumn 2024) in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
For more information about Jennifer Reiss, read her Fellow Profile.