Abolitionists were only one group among many who were interested in the bodies of enslaved women and their children. Others included the imperial government, the local government in Jamaica, planters, doctors, and enslaved people themselves. A third task of this book, then, is to investigate how abolitionist representations and prescriptions for the reproductive enslaved body conflicted with those of other parties who owned female slaves and were financially invested in fertility and child-rearing practices. Contestations over the portrayals of enslaved women’s bodies, as the book’s title suggests, emerged between Jamaican slaveholders and abolitionists. Abolitionists had humanitarian and colonial concerns, while planters were interested in continued returns on their investments.
Representations of the capabilities of black and female bodies further diverged from what estate managers did on a daily basis to manage young enslaved women. Slaveholders depicted female slaves as robust and fertile, and argued that population decline resulted from women’s promiscuity and imbalanced sex ratios instead of overwork and brutal punishment. While these depictions were obstacles to reforming the medical care extended to women and how they were disciplined, masters at times tailored the management of their female workers around the physical manifestations and medical complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Planters revisited their labor practices and methods of disciplining workers because of abolitionist pressure and imperial mandates; but they implemented reforms according to the needs and interests of their property.11 The division of labor observed on the plantations was not simply one between males and females, or between African born, Creoles, and coloreds. Rather, workers toiled according to bodily assessments, including reproductive ability and disability as well as physical development, size, shape, and weight.
A conceptual approach that focuses on the body is useful in challenging generalizations about the sexual division of labor because it requires us to examine the organization of enslaved people’s lives and labor according to specific bodily functions and the meanings given to them. Examining the womb as vital to the wealth and power of Jamaican slaveholders and future productivity of the sugar estates extends the conversations beyond sexual difference. Viewed from this perspective, the assumption that during the abolitionist era, circa 1780–1834, that women were no more sheltered from hard labor or cruel punishment than their predecessors were, is not self-evident. Rather, field and factory workers labored according to the subjective assessments planters made of female body mass and stages of pregnancy, as well as the physical and mental maturity of young people. Studying slavery through differently abled bodies counters previous conclusions that, with the exception of skilled and elite workers, such as drivers and housekeepers, labor roles were “gender blind.”12 Concerns for biological reproduction during the abolitionist era transformed both planter assessments and women’s experiences of plantation work.
In using a body approach, this book builds on the work of historians Deborah Gray White, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Jennifer Morgan, Stephanie Camp, and Deirdre Cooper Owens that explores female biological life cycles as well as the construction and use of the female body as a source and site of pleasure, medical experimentation, and disease during slavery.13 Showing how women’s childbearing ability was essential for creating gendered racial differences under slavery, Morgan’s work has been especially generative of the questions at the center of this study. How and with what outcome did abolitionists use the reproductive and maturing body to construct and legitimize a gradual path to ending slavery? How were these bodies used to determine the position and future of the enslaved within the colonies and the British Empire? How did the links abolitionists made between the reproductive body, abolition, reform, and citizenship shape the intimate and working lives of enslaved women and children as well as their parental, family, and community relationships?
In answering these questions, this study draws upon theories and perspectives from anthropology, material feminism, and gender studies.14 Studies on the reproductive lives of women and concomitant medical interventions and political and labor imperatives of modern Europe help to frame efforts to regulate and control black women’s childbearing ability and practices as part of a widespread conflict between doctors and midwives and childbearing women and workplace managers throughout the Atlantic world. From London and Paris to New York and Boston man midwives gradually displaced women attendants in the birth chambers of the city-dwelling elites. Driven partly by Enlightenment science, the advent of man midwives as the scientific authority over childbirth entangled reproductive concerns with articulations of national identities, gender order, and empire building. Eighteenth-century shifts away from viewing bodily difference between male and female as one of degree rather than absolutes required new theories. Male scientific authority over reproduction cleared a path for defining those differences and articulating them in ways befitting political and cultural needs. The ability of British men of science to explain the mysteries of the female body and reproduction reinforced gender hierarchies of male superiority that had hitherto exerted physical and moral power over women through virginity requirements, whipping for fornication, and limited legal protection for rape and domestic violence. Control over reproduction was another frontier in the quest for male domination over women’s bodies. Unlocking the secrets of women’s bodies also imbued national rhetoric of British progress, pointing out that scientific advances distinguished the practices of modern Britons from crude and superstitious practices of a bygone era and other cultures. Applying these frames to the colonial and slavery context affirms how reproduction was enmeshed in working out power and identity but also raises questions about how reproduction was complicated by the moral imperatives of abolitionism, the proprietary claims of slave ownership, and the resistance of the enslaved.
A closer look at benevolent reforms in other colonial settings also teaches us that, despite the criticisms and dissent of reformers, their medical interventions in the treatment of epidemic diseases like leprosy and cholera, for example, were not divorced from colonialism’s preoccupation with bringing subjugated populations culturally in line with the metropole, or refashioning them into workers and bureaucrats suited to fulfill the economic and political goals of the colonies. The colonial state intervened in the representation, regulation, and care of bodies it considered vital for the economic prosperity, political power, and ideological legitimation of colonialism. When applied to British slave colonies like Jamaica, abolitionist representation of enslaved women as degenerative people whose sexual perversions and gender aberrations, imputed by slavery, disqualified African captives from immediate freedom and subject citizenship and necessitated long-term reforms and gradual emancipation. Abolitionists envisioned that blacks would become culturally like metropolitan whites: Christian, married, industrious, independent, and responsible. Only then could their men become eligible to become subject-citizens.
British abolitionists grounded their campaigns on behalf of reproductive and growing bodies as fundamental for recasting the status of African-descended people from slave to free. But despite the humanitarian impulse of their campaigns, abolitionist pronatal interventions created new ways of subjugating the unfree inhabitants of the West Indian colonies. Returning to the unnamed girl in William Wilberforce’s speech, abolitionists found the story useful not only because it illustrated quite graphically the inhumanity of the slave trade but because it also allowed them to argue that modifications in gender roles and gender relations could set in motion political and economic transformations that could better serve British imperial ambitions. Preserving the sexual innocence of enslaved girls, socializing them to become wives, mothers, and homemakers as well as training boys to become fathers, heads of households, and industrious workers who were obedient to colonial authority had the power to transform debased, inefficient slave colonies into productive, well-ordered, and moral ones. According to abolitionist