At the same time, the conflicting visions of the slave body held by planters and enslaved people shattered the metropole’s romanticized ideals of women as wives, mothers, and homemakers and children as malleable clay, moldable into docile laborers and future subject-citizens. This study is not just interested in uncovering how abolitionists and planters projected their moral and economic ambitions onto the bodies of enslaved women and children; it is also concerned with how enslaved people contested the medical, gendered, and parental ideals foisted upon them. Reproductive concerns were not only essential to the social and cultural lives of the enslaved. By controlling childbearing practices, enslaved women had brief and informal access to power that temporarily inverted slavery’s white- and maledominated gender order.
Although enslaved people’s interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of the slaving class, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted white medicine and benevolence. Rather, enslaved people insisted on practicing their own birth, healing, and childcare rituals that featured herbal medicine, fostered alliances between new mothers and self-selected caregivers, and preserved the authority of enslaved midwives and healers. The authority, social bonds, and cultural practices created around reproductive health and childbirth countered the imperialist and capitalist purposes abolitionists and slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. By examining the struggles for the control of biological reproduction, this book illustrates how central pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing were to the abolition of slavery, the reorganization of plantation work, the discipline and care of slaves, and the fashioning of resistance, social life, and culture among the enslaved.
Contested Bodies therefore centers pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing practices as zones of conflict, in which abolitionists, slaveholders, doctors, the imperial and Jamaican governments, and enslaved people competed to control and regulate biological reproduction and determine who benefited from its rewards. Taking the 1780s era of abolitionism as a transformative moment in the lives of enslaved women and their children, the book examines reproductive interventions proposed by abolitionists and how they transformed, conflicted with, and shaped social customs, medical practices, labor, and punishment, as well as the relationships parents had with their children. The divergent claims on enslaved women’s ability to procreate defined the power struggles in the closing decades of slavery in Jamaica.
To understand why the 1780s marked such a major turning point in the lives of enslaved women and children, some knowledge of the earlier practices and material conditions of slavery is necessary. In framing laws that governed slave societies, slaveholding legislatures discontinued European practices of linking the status of children to their fathers and transferred it to mothers. Even though all children born to a female slave became her owner’s property, partus sequitur ventrem, slaveholders remained ambivalent about importing women and their attentiveness to childbearing. Over time, men and boys outnumbered women and girls in the transatlantic slave trade. Although scholars disagree on the reasons for and the extent of such fluctuations, most agree that the greater value planters placed on male workers played an important role.
Many planters were hostile, ambivalent, and indifferent toward pregnancy and childbirth among slaves because they feared it was a distracting, expensive, and uncertain method of replenishing worn-out and dead workers. Slave owners and plantation managers generally believed it was more cost effective to buy adult males imported via the transatlantic slave trade. Labor shortages and profit-loss calculations made planters reluctant to lose women’s labor during pregnancy and childbirth as well as the ten to sixteen years needed to raise children into capable workers. High infant mortality rates, in which less than half of Jamaica’s enslaved children survived into adulthood, also made investing in biological reproduction a gamble.
As a consequence of this unprecedented mortality, and well before the 1807 prohibition of legal slave trading, many Jamaican properties suffered from acute labor shortages. Workers were scarce because warfare and political instability sometimes made West African supplies difficult to procure. Precarious weather and Europe’s intercontinental wars also delayed the arrival of ships in West Indian harbors. Detained ships suffered from increased outbreak of illnesses and death among their already diseased, malnourished, and abused cargo. These trade complications negated gender preferences expressed by planters. Slim pickings also made those appearing healthy more expensive.
Scholars estimate that approximately 15 percent of cargo died before they arrived in the Americas. Among the dead captives not accounted for were those who perished during capture, or while traveling from their point of capture to the coast. Others died while they awaited sale and the boarding of slaving ships. At least 5 percent of those surviving the Middle Passage perished shortly after landing in the New World. Living for weeks in cramped quarters, soaked in blood, urine, feces, and pus and fed meagre, nutritionally deficient rations, many African captives arrived in the Americas diseased or debilitated.15 Captive women’s vulnerability to sexual abuse also increased the spread of sexually transmitted infections, like gonorrhea, which sometimes caused infertility. Others, like the unnamed fifteen-year-old girl on Captain Kimber’s ship, survived diseases and starvation only to die at the cruel hands of their captors.16 The abuse, neglect, and diseases from which women and girls suffered during capture and transportation meant that females landing in the West Indies were already reproductively challenged.
Workers, especially women, felt the burden of labor shortages as taskmasters allocated them to multiple jobs. During periods of extreme labor demands, like the sugar harvest, temporary hired workers or jobbers assisted with nonspecialized work. On some properties, workers had the assistance of labor-saving technology like horse-drawn plows and hoe harrows. Although women were the majority of field workers, they did not benefit from the introduction of new agricultural technology. For the few planters who invested in ploughs and harrows, their views of women as clumsy and incapable of operating machinery meant that male field hands were the main beneficiaries of mechanized agriculture. Hiring extra work hands and investing in expensive agricultural equipment, moreover, were not always compatible with the financial circumstances of estates or Jamaica’s soil and topography. This meant that women, who composed the majority of field workers and unskilled laborers around the sugar factories, had very few opportunities for a relaxation of their work routines. These factors combined to undermine fertility.17
The work rhythms of West Indian sugar estates, which are at the center of this study, were unrelenting. They made conception and pregnancy difficult and child-rearing burdensome. Workers toiled day and night, year-round, because planters feared idle hands made slaves rebellious and insolent. For six months out of the year, typically from January to June, workers kept busy with reaping cane and manufacturing sugar. For another four months they plowed the fields and planted, molded, and fertilized cane suckers. In between planting and harvesting, during the lull from June to September, workers built and repaired factory equipment and houses. If the January-to-June harvest season was quick-paced laborious work, the September-to-December planting season was slow and tedious but no less strenuous. A key difference, however, was that unlike the twenty-four-hour shift system of the harvest period, working days during the planting months more consistently started at sunrise and ended by sundown. Field workers experienced changes in labor demands based on whether planters replanted or “ratooned” canes. Fields rotated between the replanting of fresh cane suckers in cleared fields and ratooning, in which cane stumps were left in the fields to sprout the following season. Replanting consumed laborers as well as the financial resources of an estate. Ratoons saved on labor, since it relied on a natural regeneration process, but yielded less than newly planted canes. Labor routines relaxed or intensified according