Laboring women : reproduction and gender in New World slavery / Jennifer L. Morgan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Morgan, Jennifer L. (Jennifer Lyle)

Series:

Early American studies.

Early American Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Enslaved women--North America--Social conditions.

Enslaved women.

Enslaved women--West Indies, British--Social conditions.

Sex role--North America--History.

Sex role.

Sex role--West Indies, British--History.

Human reproduction--Social aspects--North America--History.

Human reproduction.

Human reproduction--Social aspects--West Indies, British--History.

Slavery--North America--History.

Slavery.

Slavery--West Indies, British--History.

North America--Race relations.

North America.

West Indies, British--Race relations.

West Indies, British.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : illustrations, maps

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, c2004.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery. Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives-from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations-she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life. Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Illustrations

Note on Sources

Introduction

Chapter 1. ''Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder'': Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology

Chapter 2. ''The Number of Women Doeth Much Disparayes the Whole Cargoe'': The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and West African Gender Roles

Chapter 3. ''The Breedings Shall Goe with Their Mothers'': Gender and Evolving Practices of Slave ownership in the English American Colonies

Chapter 4. ''Hannah and Hir Children'': Reproduction and Creolization Among Enslaved Women

Chapter 5. ''Women's Sweat'': Gender and Agricultural Labor in the Atlantic World

Chapter 6 .''Deluders and Seducers of Each Other'': Gender and the Changing Nature of Resistance

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. [251]-271) and index.

ISBN:

9780812218732

0812218736

9781283897617

128389761X

9780812206371

0812206371

OCLC:

786908037