Medical and Legal Discourse and Varieties of ‘Unnatural’ Parenthood in the Works of George Egerton

As medical knowledge progressed over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so too did the comprehension of biologically sexed identities and the range of discourses associated with gendered attributes, behaviours and desires. Political discourse also changed in consequence of these medical findings, and in the process so, too, did legal and journalistic attitudes towards those who veered from established gender and sexual stereotypes. In response, popular opinion in Britain gradually turned against attempts to limit and conscribe the rights and roles of parents such as the New Poor Law Act (1834) and its insidious Bastardy Clause. Through a comparison of Egerton's depictions of various ways of embodying parenthood with contemporaneous juridical, medical and journalistic discourse regarding reproductive and parental rights, this chapter argues that Egerton's works consistently evidence her project of offering both correctives and alternatives to discursive constructions of parenthood that were sanctioned by law and medicine. It will argue that an imperative function of many of her texts is to draw attention to differing forms of parental/carer arrangement that conform to particular cultural/natural environments, thus providing various ways of being and becoming parental that defy and challenge medical and sociolegal perceptions of identity.