For many years, there’s been a spooky tale about a strange creature with wings and a forked tail that hangs out in the pinelands of New Jersey. It’s said to be a cautionary reminder of what can happen when people’s right to make choices about having kids is taken away.
Legend has it that back in the 1700s, a woman named Mother Leeds had 12 kids already and didn’t want any more. She prayed for her 13th child to be a devil, and sure enough, the baby she had looked normal at first but then transformed into a creepy creature and flew away. This Jersey Devil has been scaring folks ever since.
I remember hearing this story as a kid in New Jersey, usually during Halloween campfires. Now I see it as a way to talk about how women’s reproductive rights are important. Even though New Jersey has good laws about abortion now, other states are making it harder for people to get the healthcare they need. The Jersey Devil story reminds us that things can get pretty scary when people can’t make their own choices about having kids.
The details of the Jersey Devil story might change, like sometimes it has a dog’s head or it’s the 8th child instead of the 13th, but the main idea stays the same: a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy, feeling angry, and something supernatural happening as a result.
The Jersey Devil myth started gaining popularity in the 1800s, during a time when reproductive rights were a hot topic.
It was first mentioned in a story by W. F. Mayer in May 1859, where he talked about the wild communities in the Pinelands. One local named Hannah Butler claimed to have encountered the Jersey Devil during a lightning storm while walking in the woods. People had been hearing strange noises from the creature since 1835. According to one version of the tale, the Jersey Devil was banished in the 1740s but reappeared in 1840.
The story is set in the Pine Barrens, an area in New Jersey known for its challenging soil and iron bogs. Some believe the legend may have originated from a religious dispute involving Daniel Leeds, a Quaker dissident who lived in New Jersey in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a book called The Domestic Life of the Jersey Devil, it’s suggested that Mother Leeds, who supposedly birthed the Jersey Devil, was based on Deborah Leeds, who had many children in the 1730s.
The Jersey Devil story changes every time it’s told. Sometimes the creature is described with a dog’s head and pig’s feet, other times it’s said to be the eighth child instead of the thirteenth. The main theme remains consistent though: an unwanted pregnancy, a mother’s anger, and a curse. It’s like a coded tale, according to folklore scholars Joan Radner and Susan Lanser, which means it can have different interpretations to protect the storyteller from saying something directly. This kind of storytelling, known as feminist folklore, allows for controversial ideas to be hidden in ambiguity so that different people see different messages in the story.
Some might interpret the Jersey Devil story as a criticism of bad mothering, but that’s not the real point. It’s actually a way of exposing misogyny, showing how lack of reproductive choices and feeling trapped can lead to desperate actions. Mother Leeds, the central figure in the story, isn’t portrayed as a monster but rather as someone struggling with a tough situation. The focus should be on the circumstances that limit her choices, not on labeling her as a bad mother.
Back in the 19th century, women didn’t have much control over when they got pregnant. Birth control pills weren’t a thing until the 1950s, and condoms have been around since the Middle Ages. Married women couldn’t rely on abstinence either, as marital rape was legal in the US until the 1970s. Enslaved women had no protection against rape, and forced pregnancies were used as a form of violence. In New Jersey, slavery was gradually abolished starting in 1804, but it continued in practice for many years. Many mothers in the 19th century died during childbirth, which sadly still happens today, especially among Black mothers who often don’t receive proper care.
Because preventing pregnancies was tough, some women in 19th-century New Jersey turned to abortion. Before the 1840s, abortion early in pregnancy was considered a normal way of birth control. Herbs like hellebore, pennyroyal, and tansy were used for centuries to end pregnancies before the fetus started moving. In the 1830s and 40s, there were ads for pills and new tools to perform abortions.
Between 1840 and 1880, abortion started getting more attention in the United States. Back then, most doctors were white men who went to medical school. In New Jersey, officially trained doctors were competing with self-taught herbalists like James Still, known as the Black Doctor of the Pines. The university-trained doctors wanted to limit medical practice to those with proper credentials, so they raised concerns about the safety and ethics of abortion. Abortion was traditionally done by female healers, midwives, and other experienced but unlicensed practitioners. Due to pressure from the medical community, states began banning abortions and punishing providers. In 1849, New Jersey passed its first law against performing abortions on pregnant women.
Before 1840, abortion was mainly used by poor, unmarried women to avoid the shame of having a child out of wedlock. Later on, it became a way for wealthier families to control the size of their families.
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Early laws focused on punishing abortion providers rather than the women seeking abortions. For example, in 1858, a New Jersey court case ruled that the law against abortion couldn’t be applied to women seeking abortions, only to those providing the service. Abortion providers were often portrayed as evil in newspapers and books. One book from 1872 called abortion a monstrous heresy and spread misinformation about preventing cervical cancer. An illustration in the National Police Gazette depicted a famous abortion provider as a sinister figure accompanied by a devil-like creature.
In the 1800s, the anti-abortion movement was worried that Irish and Italian immigrants would outnumber native-born Protestant Americans if abortion wasn’t stopped. This fear fueled anti-Catholic sentiment. Before the 1840s, abortion was mainly seen as a way for poor, unmarried women to avoid the shame of having a baby out of wedlock. However, by the mid-1800s, it was also viewed as a way for wealthy Protestant women with children to limit their family size.
The story of the Jersey Devil became popular around this time, coinciding with the criminalization of abortion in the U.S. due to stigma and legal actions. There are limited accounts from pregnant women in the 1800s about the struggles of forced childbirth, with some found in a book by abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright.
These personal stories, along with folklore like the Jersey Devil, can shed light on historical attitudes and behaviors not captured in official records. Today, sharing experiences of ending pregnancies, whether through social media or word of mouth, remains a way to speak out against restrictions on abortion access. The message from the Jersey Devil story is clear: a society without reproductive choice is monstrous.
