Laboring Women

I've been reading, and re-reading, Jennifer Morgan's "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery," since it was published in 2004. It completely transformed the field of slavery studies by doing something, that in many ways, seems so simple - it paid attention to the ways that enslaved women performed both production and reproductive labor, and then explored what the implications of that double-bind are for our understandings of slavery itself. Every time I re-read this book I find something new, or realize that Morgan covered something that I'd forgotten was in there. If you want to understand the… show more.

Jennifer Morgan’s history of childbearing in the Black Atlantic cracked open an entirely new field, exposing how American society has for centuries relied on Black women’s work as mothers. Her attention to the role of reproduction in the perpetuation of racial slavery in the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exposed how European imperialism had, from its inception, relied upon pushing Black women into dual roles as labourers in the fields of new world plantations and also as labouring mothers. Morgan’s analysis of European travel literature highlights how white men’s perceptions of Black women’s bodies was shaped by these… show more.