In the late 1800s, women in Arizona, as in other places in the U.S., had no direct say in laws governing their bodies. As someone who teaches history in Arizona and researches slavery, I think it is useful to understand what life was like in Arizona when this abortion ban was in force.

In 1864, Arizona – which was an official territory of the United States – was a vast desert.

In the 1870s, Arizona had less than 10,000 residents, excluding Native Americans, whom the Census refused to count and the U.S. refused to grant citizenship.

Most women living in territorial Arizona were Diné, meaning Navajo, or Chiricahua Apache. In 1864, the U.S. Army was fighting Indigenous people in an effort to take Native lands. U.S. forces crowded Apaches onto reservations in Arizona and New Mexico.

All women in Arizona could not vote, serve on juries or exercise full control over property in a marriage. Demographically, the territory had a pronounced gender imbalance in favor of men – women were just one-quarter of the non-Native population.

Most of the white men in Arizona moved there to work as miners and soldiers. People there also worked on cattle ranches and grew cotton. Mining and ranching interests controlled politics, and many Arizonans supported the Southern Confederacy, though Arizona was a free territory in 1863, meaning slavery was not legal.

Many politicians in Arizona, like House Speaker William Claude Jones, were transplants from the South.

Jones was responsible for shepherding the abortion ban through the Legislature. Around this time, Jones abandoned his first wife. Throughout his life, he would have three more wives, including a 12-year-old, a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old at the time of their weddings.

Women had few basic rights in Arizona before it became a state in 1912. And territorial law did not favor women.

Hispanic and African American women had even fewer rights than white women. Arizona punished anyone who kidnapped a Black person for the purpose of selling them into slavery. But, at the same time, it outlawed “all marriages of white persons with negroes or mulattoes.”

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