Contested bodies : pregnancy, childrearing, and slavery in Jamaica / Sasha Turner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Turner, Sasha, author.

Series:

Early American studies.

Early American Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Slavery--Jamaica--Social conditions--18th century.

Slavery.

Slavery--Jamaica--Social conditions--19th century.

Pregnancy--Jamaica--History--18th century.

Pregnancy.

Pregnancy--Jamaica--History--19th century.

Motherhood--Jamaica--History--18th century.

Motherhood.

Motherhood--Jamaica--History--19th century.

Enslaved children--Jamaica--Social conditions--18th century.

Enslaved children.

Enslaved children--Jamaica--Social conditions--19th century.

Antislavery movements--Jamaica--History--18th century.

Antislavery movements.

Antislavery movements--Jamaica--History--19th century.

Jamaica.

Genre:

History

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources--including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence--Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Contents:

Conceiving moral and industrious subjects: women, children, and abolition

"The best ones who are fit to breed: the quest for biological reproduction

When workers become mothers, who works? Motherhood, labor, and punishment

Buckra doctor no do you no good: struggles over maternal health care

Dead before the ninth day: struggles over neonatal care

Mothers know best? Maternal authority and children's survival

Raising hardworking adults: labor, punishment, and slave childhood

Conclusion: transforming slavery.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Jun 2017)

ISBN:

9780812294057

081229405X

OCLC:

987086648