Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery
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...
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How childbearing among enslaved women became commodified—and was exploited by slaveowners as well as slaves.
List of IllustrationsNote on SourcesIntroduction1"Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder" : Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology122"The Number of Women Doeth Much Disparayes the Whole Cargoe" : The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and West African Gender Roles503"The Breedings Shall Goe with Theri Mothers" : Gender and Evolving Practices of Slaveownership in the English American Colonies694"Hannah and Hir Children" : Reproduction and Creolization Among Enslaved Women1075"Women's Sweat" : Gender and Agricultural Labor in the Atlantic World1446"Deluders and Seducers of Each Other" : Gender and the Changing Nature of Resistance166Epilogue196Notes203Bibliography251Index273Acknowledgments277
\ From the Publisher"Morgan's highly original study transforms our understanding of the fundamental assumptions behind slavery in the Americas."—Kathleen M. Brown, University of Pennsylvania\ "Morgan's remarkably lucid treatment of the role of gender in constructing racial ideologies and in justifying the economic system of slavery should make such complex themes accessible to advanced undergraduates. Her book succeeds in highlighting the importance of African women in determining the shape of the slave system in the New World, as well as the ways in which the system shaped the experiences of African women. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice\ "The author of this study has made a major contribution . . . by looking specifically at the issue of gender as a lens through which better to understand the establishment of race-based slavery in Britain's colonies in the Caribbean and North America."—The Historian\ \ \
