In the late nineteenth century, Americans opposed to universal suffrage launched a new line of attack, asserting that women lacked the rationality required for enfranchisement because of innate biological disabilities. After the Civil War, debates about women’s mental and physical capacity shifted from those rooted in divine ordinance and Enlightenment rationality to those grounded in science and evolutionary theory. New research conclusions combined with an existing system of legal dependency to form a powerful new discourse of exclusion which still echoes today. As the twentieth century turned, practitioners of the newly prestigious scientific disciplines provided rationales for anti-suffragists to label these sex-based differences as physical and mental disabilities. Women’s rights advocates rejected these characterizations, but rarely refuted the assumption that disability justified exclusion. This article approaches these debates with disability as the center of inquiry to explore the intertwined nature of legal and biological power.

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Yvonne Pitts explores inheritance practices by focusing on nineteenth-century testamentary capacity trials in Kentucky in which disinherited family members challenged relatives' wills. These disappointed heirs claimed that their departed relative lacked the capacity required to write a valid will. These inheritance disputes criss-crossed a variety of legal and cultural terrains, including ordinary people's understandings of what constituted insanity and justice, medical experts' attempts to infuse law with science, and the independence claims of women. Pitts uncovers the contradictions in the body of law that explicitly protected free will while simultaneously reinforcing the primacy of blood in mediating claims to inherited property. By anchoring the study in local communities and the texts of elite jurists, Pitts demonstrates that 'capacity' was a term laden with legal meaning and competing communal values about family, race relations and rationality. These concepts evolved as Kentucky transitioned from a conflicted border state with slaves to a developing free-labor, industrializing economy.

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