By Collin Xia
Introduction
Black mothers’ bodies and labor were integral to colonial monoculture export economies and the racial slavery system more broadly. They were “important sites of political struggles over slavery, abolition, and colonial reform,” as their sexuality, reproductive labor, and childrearing practices served as zones of conflict, in which abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people themselves competed to control (Turner, “Contested Bodies” 10; Altink 1-3; Morrissey 127). By employing the work of Black feminist theorists and historians, this essay privileges the feminized, unarmed, sexual, bodily defiance of enslaved mothers within the greater, often masculinized Caribbean slavery scholarship. It will center the neglected bodily archives of enslaved mothers in the British Caribbean to interrogate slave breeding practices from the prohibition of the slave trade in 1807 to the abolition of slavery in 1833. These practices saw the destructive loss and intensification of racialized gender and motherhood. Enslaved mothers—positioned at the nexus of race, gender, and capital—were given a renewed mandate to produce a “working population suitable for building and sustaining the British imperial enterprise” (Turner, “Home-Grown Slaves” 42). This essay argues that in this transitionary window, between the old slave regime and its abolishment, enslaved mothers challenged slave breeding initiatives through maternal resistance strategies. Through exercising sexual autonomy, abortion, infanticide, and African-inspired childcare practices, enslaved women slowed down or outright ended (re)production under slavery. These forms of resistance counteract enslaved mothers’ illegibility within heroic accounts of the Black resistance.
The first section of this essay will describe the legal and ideological struggle between British abolitionists and slaveholders over slave abolition from the 1760s to 1833. The debate sparked increased discourse and control over Black maternity. Notably, abolitionists framed Black mothers as the source of a self-replenishing labor force that justified the abolition of the slave trade. As abolitionism gained momentum in Britain, slaveholders began slave breeding projects to secure a new source of labor for a future without readily available slave imports. The second section begins to unravel the narrative that British intellectuals, parliamentarians, and humanitarians were the sole force fighting against the slave system. I do so by centering enslaved mothers’ practical and often clandestine strategies to exert control over their bodies and reproduction. Finally, the conclusion will tie this investigation of reproductive resistance together and make concluding comments on Caribbean scholarship’s neglect of Black mothers’ feminized, unarmed, sexual, bodily defiance.
Racial Logics of Black Motherhood in the “War of Representation”
Britain’s Age of Abolition, defined in this article as from the 1760s to 1833, includes early anti-slavery campaigns to the final prohibition of slavery. During this period, evangelical Christians and social reformers led a mass movement towards abolition. This movement coincided with the fall of sugar prices and the “natural” decrease of slave populations in the British Caribbean, most notably in Jamaica, the empire’s largest slave colony and the locus of abolitionist discourse (Altink 1-12; Morrissey 101). In what Catherine Hall has called “the war of representation,” fervent debates between pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates dominated public discourse in both the metropole and the colonies (107-115).
The racial logics under contention in the “war of representation” were grounded on the assumption that enslaved women’s bodies were producers of blackness and its enslavability (Kaplan 14). This assumption was codified in the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, which dictated that a child’s status as enslaved or free was “according to the condition of the mother,” allowing slaveholders to claim the offspring of their female slaves as property ( J. Morgan, “Partus Sequitur Ventrem” 4). This notion lies at the intersection of chattel slavery and the institution of motherhood, the body of practices and assumptions governing maternity. The doctrine broke from patriarchal norms where heritable status passed through the father, and instead, evoked animal husbandry to establish a racial property regime that transformed all aspects of an enslaved woman’s body and labor into white property.
Partus Sequitur Ventrem made the figure of the enslaved Black woman a crucial site of political and cultural contestation. Both the opponents and proponents of slavery deployed the doctrine in their appropriation of enslaved mothers’ image and reproductive capacity (Turner, “Home-grown Slaves” 39). Abolitionists exposed the sexual and physical abuse enslaved women endured to provoke outrage and oppose slaveholders’ interests in preserving the status quo. They also argued that slavery impeded enslaved women’s ability to exercise metropolitan ideals of womanhood (Altink 3). Their arguments emphasized how slavery restricted enslaved women’s ability to act as proper mothers, stifled their “potential” humanity, and hindered the reproduction of a free, efficient Black labor force (2-3). On the other hand, slaveholders and their allies worked to prolong slavery and justify increased interventions on enslaved women’s bodies. They portrayed enslaved women as sexually deviant and naturally unloving, unfit mothers (38). While modern maternal theorists critique the essentialist view that women naturally possess nurturing qualities and an aptitude for child-rearing, many slaveholders actively denied these qualities to enslaved women (Rich 34). They based this denial on a racial logic that degendered enslaved women, portraying them as “anti-mothers,” lacking maternal instincts (Spillers 67; Altink 17; J. Morgan, “Reckoning” 221). This figuration understands Black motherhood itself to be contradictory and denied enslaved women’s maternal potential. Enslaved women were rendered primarily as exploitable workers rather than mothers or reproducers. Slaveholders asserted that the slave system was a necessary form of social control in which enslaved women could be incentivized to be more fitting mothers (Altink 5-6). As the slave system waned, competing factions of the slave abolition debate deployed the institution of motherhood to delineate the limits of Black maternity. They competed to dictate Black women’s capacity to cultivate an ideal motherhood and, by extension, full humanity. In this context, the institution of motherhood was contested under slavery and subordinated under opposing economic, political, and social agendas for Caribbean plantocracies.
Abolition of the slave trade and new demographic goals
The “war of representation” set the stage for an intensified focus on slave breeding following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. As external sources of enslaved labor were cut off, the reproductive capacities of enslaved women became central to the maintenance of the Caribbean plantocracies, leading to new forms of control and exploitation under the guise of “amelioration.”
Despite enslaved women’s designated role as passive producers of slavery, birth rates among Caribbean enslaved women were consistently low since the onset because slaveholders more readily exploited Black women as forced manual laborers (Morrissey 100). In many cases, work conditions on plantations jeopardized pregnancies and some slaveholders outright discouraged them, viewing the physiological needs of pregnancies and child-rearing as distractions (14). Sasha Turner chronicles the lead-up to the abolition of the slave trade in Jamaica, revealing that before the emergence of the abolitionist movement, slaveholders considered male slaves to be “more versatile and capable of performing the sugar plantations’ variously demanding agro-industrial tasks.” (“Home-grown Slaves” 39). On the other hand, enslaved women were considered less valuable due to their physiological needs during and after pregnancies, which were viewed as “distractions by capitalistic planters whose main focus was maintaining productivity and profitability” (39-40). In this context, Black motherhood, from conception to childrearing was rendered unproductive. At the time, slaveholders did not value women’s symbolic role in reproducing slave status and found it more profitable to purchase adult males in their physical prime than to accommodate women’s pregnancies. Nevertheless, the work conditions on plantations ensured reproductive capacities were severely limited (Morrissey 11). The disregard for enslaved women’s reproduction reflects their primary role as producers within the slave economy. Enslaved mothers stood in stark contrast to the metropolitan ideal of womanhood, which emphasized women’s roles as reproducers and caregivers. This suppression of enslaved reproduction served dual purposes: it met the immediate economic interests of slaveholders while simultaneously reinforcing the racial and gendered hierarchies underpinning the slave system. Notably, the exploitation of enslaved women’s productive labor contributed to the economic conditions that allowed for the maintenance of bourgeois nuclear families, where white women could fulfill their prescribed roles as sole caregivers, secluded in the private realm.
Abolitionists strategically opposed enslaved women’s primary role as producers to exploit their reproductive labor for a racial eugenics program. Abolitionist elites confined themselves to the principle that slave labor was wasteful and inefficient compared to the moral and economic superiority of free labor (Drescher 107). Abolitionists argued that systematic slave breeding initiatives would make slave trading obsolete and sustain the plantation economy (Turner, “Home-Grown Slaves” 42). Abolitionist arguments “mobilized a particular racial violence against black sexuality and motherhood,” advocating for increased control over enslaved women’s fertility and maternity (Turner, “Contested Bodies” 23). However, abolitionists supported a gradual transition to free labor as enslaved Africans were deemed too “uncivilized” to exercise agency in labor (Drescher 108). Thus, enslaved mothers became central to abolitionist demographic and economic goals of creating a free laboring population that could be molded into ideal subject-citizens of the empire (Turner, “Home-Grown Slaves” 42). Most slaveholders rejected the notion that their slaves could be reformed into equally free subjects. Nevertheless, once the campaign to end the slave trade took hold in the 1780s, British Caribbean plantocracies foresaw that plantations could not rely on legal African slave imports to replenish their work force. As such slaveholders reconsidered the profitability of women’s reproductive labor. While abolitionists and slaveholders were opposed to the abolition of slavery, both factions agreed that plantations had to evolve by ameliorating conditions and setting up slave breeding initiatives centered on an industrialized Black motherhood (J. Morgan, “Laboring Women” 11). For slaveholders, these practices were necessary to manage slave demographics and rescue the entire racial slave enterprise. Their efforts reveal shifting understandings of Black motherhood and ambitions to sustain Caribbean plantocracies as production centers of not just agricultural commodities but also human commodities.
The emergence of slave breeding programs across British plantocracies marked a shift in the conceptualization of Black maternity. The discursive and material conditions of the Age of Abolition paradoxically highlighted Black motherhood as an inexhaustible wellspring of “Black flesh.” The term “Black flesh” is used in reference to Hortense J. Spillers’ seminal text, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, where Spillers distinguishes the body as belonging to a socially recognized, individuated human, and flesh as an undifferentiated, captive position of extreme objectification (67). To exist as flesh is to be devoid of humanity, to succumb to a raw, bare form of existence, reducible to units of property. Slaveholders reinvigorated Black motherhood as a mode of production to sustain the slave system. Conversely, abolitionists highlighted enslaved women’s reproductive capacities to produce potential Black “bodies” that would be eventually emancipated as free laborers. In both cases, enslaved women’s reproduction was commodified, generating capital for the racial capitalist enterprise. Black maternity’s connection to capital blurs the boundary of the gendered schism between private and public enforced under heteropatriarchy. Feminist theorists have critiqued the confinement of reproduction to the private sphere and the failure to recognize it as legitimate production (Rich 13). However, racial slavery always enforced Black motherhood as productive, public, and commodifiable. Racial patriarchy establishes white motherhood as a private, nurturing role that produces fully recognized human subjects, and Black motherhood as a public, a mode of production that generates Black flesh with potential humanity. These two forms of motherhood, contest and constitute one another in a hierarchy of property relations. The “war of representation” surrounding slave abolition was another attempt to reconcile the contradictions that Black motherhood inadvertently exposed—the productive nature of all reproductive labor.
Evidently, the survival of the plantocracies rested on increased control of Black women’s reproductive labor, underpinned by competing racial ideologies about Black women’s capacity to bear and nurture fully human subjects. The success of the slave trade abolition campaign led to increased commodification of enslaved women’s reproductive potential. Slaveholders, adapting to new economic realities, shifted their slave purchasing patterns to select more women of child-bearing age and began plantation breeding programs to secure an alternative labor force (Turner, “Home-Grown Slaves” 41). This era, ostensibly one of progress towards abolition, ushered in a period of anxiety fuelled violence and control over previously neglected “resources”: the womb and Black motherhood.
Maternal resistance against slave breeding initiatives
An analysis of the abolitionist-planter struggle over enslaved mothers’ reproductive capacities is not inclusive of the agency enslaved mothers exercised by sabotaging the slave breeding campaigns. Slaveholders’ new program to facilitate the “natural” increase of the slave population saw shifts in sex ratios, labor routines, and punishments to ensure that enslaved mothers could perform their dual roles in commodity production, regenerating the slave system through reproductive labor and their manual labor in producing sugar for export (40-41). The specifics of the slave breeding program varied across islands and plantations but generally included the discouragement of illicit relations among slaves (Reddock 73). Despite their conflicting objectives, slaveholders and abolitionists found common ground in using marriage to encourage slave reproduction, control women’s sexuality, and preserve the racial hierarchy in the colonies (Morrissey 125). The push for slave marriages reflected broader metropolitan debates about whether enslaved women were naturally promiscuous or capable of adhering to normative womanhood. Arranging slave marriages aimed to subjugate Black sexuality and motherhood under the institution of marriage to produce legitimate, racially “pure” slave children (Reddock 71). The twin institutions of marriage and motherhood disciplined Black women under heteropatriarchy. These interventions were meant to increase fertility and incentivize procreation. For abolitionists, the prospect of a generation of moral, free Black subjects was critical in arguing for the abolition of slavery. They viewed the “depravity” of casual unions and interracial relationships among the enslaved as detrimental to articulating Black women’s potential humanity. Consequently, forming heterosexual conjugal units became essential to shedding Black women’s degraded status and crucial for the moral and spiritual education of slave children.
Despite metropolitan efforts, many enslaved women rejected marriage and maintained a degree of sexual autonomy. Enslaved women of this period continued their causal relationships as marriage represented another form of “social death” that placed them under the nominal control of a husband (Paugh 629-630). Rhonda Reddock reveals that the contempt for marriage among enslaved women was because “it meant extra work and being confined to one man” when both men and women often maintained multiple relationships (69). Moreover, the goal of fostering heteropatriarchal marriages in the image of metropolitan family units was inherently flawed. Male and female slaves were both reduced to property status and normative roles and obligations in patriarchal marriage conflicted with slaveholders’ absolute ownership of slaves. Enslaved men lacked the means to act as traditional husbands, while women, as producers, could not achieve the ideal of respectable domestic womanhood. Enslaved women further resisted metropolitan goals by continuing interracial relationships, thwarting efforts to create a “purely African plantation labor force” (Paugh 644). While the sexual economies of British slave societies fostered violent, exploitative relationships between enslaved women and white men, interracial relationships also provided rare opportunities of mobility and protection in the plantation hierarchy (647). Overall, within the slavery discourse, enslaved women’s sexual habits and procreation patterns were markers of their (in)humanity. In this context, intensified control of enslaved women’s sexuality was crucial to both the proponents and opponents of slavery. Their efforts were contested by enslaved women who exercised agency over their sexuality and evaded forced marriages against the plantocracies’ demographic goals.
For enslaved mothers who could not exercise sexual autonomy on the plantation, the slave breeding project resulted in pregnancies. However, resistance continued after conception as mothers exercised agency over their bodies and their children throughout their pregnancies and the child-rearing process. Black feminist historians have since compiled glimpses of these forms of direct action and compel us to place them at the heart of our inquiry. Under intensifying demands to reproduce, many enslaved women chose abortion and infanticide against the wishes of slaveholders (Harris 152). Shepherd suggests that enslaved women understood the implications of the abolition of the slave trade, and freed their “enchained wombs” by refusing to bear children (142). Kenneth Morgan attests to enslaved women’s use of abortive agents or physical violence to induce self-abortion, as well as the practice of maternal infanticide (234). Infanticide under these conditions involves refusing to produce or exist as Black flesh under racial slavery. Childbirth under chattel slavery was twisted into a tragic paradox: the act of birth was simultaneously an act of “social death” for their children, born as property and stripped of their personhood (Paugh 640). Just as the Middle Passage converted captive humans into cargo, the enslaved womb can be likened to a factory producing “blackness as abjection” (Sharpe 63). The birth canal thus becomes a domestic Middle Passage through which enslaved Caribbean mothers usher their children into a property status (63). These women repossessed their bodies to prevent their children from living as slaves and robbed their owners of their “property.” These acts of resistance were often unnoticed by slaveholders as the reproduction rates among enslaved women in the British Caribbean were historically low due to the bodily and emotional damage caused by their tremendous workload and frequent abuse (K. Morgan 252). These abortions and infanticides are further silenced by the women themselves and easily mistaken for miscarriages. Crucially, this form of resistance unfolded in a deeply intimate battleground, the womb itself. Through these devastating acts of self-protection, enslaved mothers carved out a private sphere to exert control over their wombs through the final act of motherhood. It is a bitter irony that traces of these painful acts of resistance often emerge in the margins of slaveholders’ or overseers’ ledgers or journals (246). These very documents unwittingly preserve evidence of enslaved women’s defiance and bodily autonomy.
Conversely, a mother choosing to keep her child and cherish them is also a form of resistance in a society that systematically tore families apart for profit and discouraged familial bonds. When many of these mothers carried their children to term, they faced a choice of giving birth in their community with the aid of a midwife or in clinics operated by doctors hired by slave masters. Many women chose to deliver their babies in their communities against the advice of doctors who warned of unsafe conditions and poor midwife practices (Turner, “Contested Bodies” 14). Before slaveholders took a special interest in reproductive labor in the 1780s, enslaved mothers and community members held a measure of autonomy having developed “autonomous social networks and customs around maternal and infant care” (14). In choosing to rely on midwives and their community to successfully deliver their children, women exercised control over their bodies and challenged slaveowners’ power over the process by choosing who could touch them and care for their bodies/reproductive health. Lastly, following the birth of their children, many enslaved mothers employed African child-rearing practices which involved nursing their children for two years, sometimes up to three or four years, which stalled their reproductive capacities (K. Morgan 243). Morgan claims that a longer nursing period entailed longer lactation, which served as a natural means of contraception: “either through the physiological suppression of fertility in the mother by producing breast milk or through the social impact of constant nurturing of infants and consequent unavailability to men” (243). Morgan suggests that long lactation periods and post-partum taboos against a mother’s resumption of intercourse during the nursing period are “carry-overs from traditions in West African societies” and contributed to extensive birth-spacing practice among slaves (243). By deployed cultural childrearing practices, nursing mothers were able to remain physically attached to their infants for longer and avoid other work on the plantation. Ultimately, maternal resistance is undertaken in many forms after conception, from abortion and infanticide to observing culturally informed maternal health and child-rearing practices. To that end, enslaved mothers contributed to sabotaging the demographic goals of slaveholders and abolitionists. The slave breeding program ultimately failed to yield sustained results as slave populations continued to decline until the abolition of slavery in 1833 (Morrissey 11).
To conclude, during the Age of Abolition, enslaved women’s reproductive capacities gained unprecedented significance to slaveholders and abolitionists. This essay has examined Jamaican and other British Caribbean sources to argue that enslaved mothers were sites of colonial power as well as sites of maternal resistance as women exercised agency over their sexuality, pregnancy, childbirth experience, and child-rearing process. This essay has sought to center the female body in slavery scholarship to confirm that reproductive labor and motherwork are essential in the struggles for freedom. The various forms of obstruction this essay has noted focus on everyday forms of symbolic/material resistance. While some enslaved women resisted through marronage, permanently escaping to the hinterlands, temporarily fleeing with periodic returns, or hiding in plain sight in public markets, this essay has primarily explored informal, everyday forms of resistance (Shepherd 139; Sweeney 204). These forms of maternal resistance did not amount to institutional confrontation, but rather subversion or withdrawal. As James C. Scott argues, everyday resistance seeks de facto gains without overtly contesting formal hierarchy and power. For enslaved women who lacked the means to directly overthrow racial capitalism or the institution of motherhood, these covert forms of resistance became their primary option (29-30). Collectively, these forms of resistance coalesced into a decentralized maternal strike which removed or resisted the production of essential labor and capital from the plantation economy. Though not overtly visible, this maternal strike significantly constrained planters’ and metropolitan authorities’ ability to implement their demographic goals. Black maternal resistance highlights the intrinsic contradiction that Black women are the source of the Black “flesh” to be consumed by racial capitalism, but are also creators of the liberated Black bodies that can ensure its end. This duality positions the Black maternal body as a site of heightened colonial domination while also serving as a crucible of revolutionary resistance. The final decades of British Caribbean slavery attune us to the revolutionary work that Black mothers undertook to accelerate the system’s collapse. Their actions reveal that resistance and accommodation under slavery and in its afterlife are not binary. Under chattel slavery, a mother’s choice to bear children or not defies simple categorization of resistance or compliance. Mothers faced a system that sought to deny all forms of kinship while also requiring the intensification of an enslavable matrilineal line. In the end, the slave breeding program of the Abolitionist era could not withstand such an acute contradiction.
This essay affirms Black mothers as anti-colonial, anti-capitalist theorists of power by highlighting their efforts to slow down or outright end the (re)production of Black flesh under slavery. Despite their importance, maternal resistance is overlooked in narratives of slavery and abolition. Women have long participated in the armed struggles against slavery and colonialism and at times have been recognized in those efforts. However, by focusing on mothers’ bodies, sexuality, and labor as a site of resistance, this essay deconstructs resistance beyond the militaristic and triumphant struggle particularly prominent in the Caribbean. Instead, this essay privileges the unarmed, clandestine, bodily resistance as equally revolutionary. It underscores these forms of direct action as necessary in undermining the foundations of racial capitalism and shaping the nature of Black emancipation.
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