Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Early American Studies)

In "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery", Jennifer L. Morgan “argues that as slaveowners contemplated women’s reproductive potential with greed and opportunism, they utilized both outrageous images and callously indifferent strategies to ultimately inscribe enslaved women as racially and culturally different while creating an economic and moral environment in which the appropriation of a woman’s children as well as her childbearing potential became rational and, indeed, natural” (pg. 7). In this way, Morgan explores “the ways in which slavery changes the meaning of reproduction for the enslaved and the ways in which reproduction changes the experience of enslavement” (pg. 10). Further, “The expectations and experience of reproduction significantly influenced both the violence done to enslaved African women in the Americas and their ability to survive it” (pg. 11). Finally, Morgan argues, “The entire framework of slavery as an institution rested upon these contradictory assumptions and that centering the lives of enslaved women in the colonial period is not simply an exercise of inclusion but is rather a foundational methodology in writing the history of early America” (pg. 11).
Morgan writes, “Gender does not operate as a more profound category of difference than race; instead racialist discourse was deeply imbued with ideas about gender and sexual difference that, indeed, became manifest only in contact with each other” (pg. 15). She continues, “Those who would capture African women to exploit their labors in the Americas would have to grapple with, and harness, those women’s dual identity as workers and parents; once having done so they would inaugurate a language of race and racial hierarchy in which that dualism was reduced to denigration and mobilized as evidence of European distinction” (pg. 25). Further, “African women’s Africanness became contingent on the linkages between sexuality and a savagery that fitted them for both productive and reproductive labor” (pg. 36). Morgan writes, “African women most emphatically embodied the ideological definitions of what racial slavery ultimately meant. The inheritability of slavery depended upon the biological capacity of African mothers and fathers to pass their social identity as enslaveable – marked as it was on their skin – onto the bodies of their children. Racial slavery, then, functioned euphemistically as a social condition forged in African women’s wombs” (pg. 56).
According to Morgan, “Slaveowners ‘coupled’ men and women, named them husband and wife, and foresaw their own future in the bellies of enslaved workers. Childbirth, then, needs to stand alongside the more ubiquitously evoked scene of violence and brutality at the end of a slaveowner’s lash or branding iron” (pg. 105). Morgan writes, “The process through which slaveowners arrived at their understandings about the reach of their power were deeply implicated by their assumptions about women’s bodies and women’s work” (pg. 107). Turning to the Caribbean, Morgan writes, “If women enslaved in Barbados who survived a Middle Passage that sapped them of strength, hope, and the tangibility of their future, looked toward childbirth with the notion of reclaiming at least one familiar cultural process, they must have been shaken by the new terms and consequences of reproduction” (pg. 121). She continues, “Those women who could and did keep their children close were involved in a series of negotiated relationships with slaveowers” (pg. 132).
Morgan writes, “Slaveowners came to understand racial slavery as well as plantation management through a series of images, calculations, and experiences in which the notions of sex and race were fully intertwined. Enslaved women, and men too, from the moment they set foot aboard slave ships or were born in American colonies, came to understand their identity under slavery as marked by sex and race” (pg. 144). Further, “In the vacuum of perpetual resistance, there is no pain, no suffering, no wounds. Perhaps no better evidence of this conflict in interpretive frames exists than childbirth in a system that both relied upon and devalued it. It is to that end that centering or isolating enslaved women’s acts of political and economic autonomy is appropriate in a study that has explored the multiplicities of enslaved women’s reproductive lives” (pg. 167). Morgan writes, “Enslaved women threw their weight against the confines of their enslavement in many different ways. The tactics with which enslaved women expressed their anger, grief, and desperation about enslavement were obviously not strictly embodied – in other words, it was not just about regulating their fertility or raising children” (pg. 176). Morgan concludes, “On the most reductive level, this study has illustrated simply that African women were there” (pg. 197). In this, “Gender them – the range of interpretive possibilities around which socially inscribed identities are formed – is crucial to the work of early African-American history” (pg. 200).

In this engaging work, Jennifer Morgan looks at African women and slavery in early colonial Barbados and South Carolina. She focuses on these women's dual roles in production and reproduction. Thus, Morgan discusses not only women's bodies and gender issues, but also their labor. She argues that enslaved women's labor was physically vital to the evolution of slavery in these British colonies. While their physical labor helped the economy expand and develop, their reproductive labor ended up defining the system of slavery. Unlike slavery in the past, the children born to enslaved women became slaves themselves.
Morgan begins by discussing the emergence of a gendered racial ideology of African women, which led to the view that African women did not feel pain in childbirth or strenuous labor. This lack of pain made then un-Christian and suitable for slavery (p. 40). It also made them suitable for hard work. Morgan argues that these depictions also shaped English ideas about race before they ever laid eyes on an African. Thus, Morgan agrees with David Eltis' assessment that racism existed before the colonies were ever settled. Morgan then discusses the experience of enslaved women in the Americas by discussing slaveholders' attitudes about reproduction, the disruption of enslaved families, and the ways that work affected reproduction. Morgan emphasizes that the slaveholders held the power, but is also quick to point out that enslaved women were able to shape their own familial experiences.
This is a well-crafted work, but it does seem to be lacking in two areas. First, Morgan discusses sex and reproduction, but there is practically no discussion of slave women being exploited as sexual objects. Throughout the book, Morgan discusses the dynamics of the power slave owners held, but does not bring up miscegenation. Second, the subtitle of the book is a misnomer. Morgan focuses almost exclusively on Barbados and South Carolina. That does not seem to be indicative of "New World slavery."
In the end, these are minor problems. Morgan's discussion of African women's labor is insightful as is the focus on the dual roles of production and reproduction. These topics are important and have not been investigated to this depth by other scholars. Especially interesting is her discussion of the origins of the stereotypes of African women and how those led to African women being viewed as racial, sexual objects. This book is sure to be a valuable resource for scholars of slavery, gender, and British colonial history.