Laboring Women

Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

Jennifer L. Morgan

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812206371
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

When black women were brought from Africa to the New World as slave laborers, their value was determined by their ability to work as well as their potential to bear children, who by law would become the enslaved property of the mother's master. In Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan examines for the first time how African women's labor in both senses became intertwined in the English colonies. Beginning with the ideological foundations of racial slavery in early modern Europe, Laboring Women traverses the Atlantic, exploring the social and cultural lives of women in West Africa, slaveowners' expectations for reproductive labor, and women's lives as workers and mothers under colonial slavery.Challenging conventional wisdom, Morgan reveals how expectations regarding gender and reproduction were central to racial ideologies, the organization of slave labor, and the nature of slave community and resistance. Taking into consideration the heritage of Africans prior to enslavement and the cultural logic of values and practices recreated under the duress of slavery, she examines how women's gender identity was defined by their shared experiences as agricultural laborers and mothers, and shows how, given these distinctions, their situation differed considerably from that of enslaved men. Telling her story through the arc of African women's actual lives—from West Africa, to the experience of the Middle Passage, to life on the plantations—she offers a thoughtful look at the ways women's reproductive experience shaped their roles in communities and helped them resist some of the more egregious effects of slave life.Presenting a highly original, theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation in slavery, Laboring Women is a distinctive contribution to the literature of slavery and the history of women.

Chapter 1

“Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology

Prior to their entry onto the stage of New World conquests, women of African descent lived in bodies unmarked by what would emerge as Europe’s preoccupation with physiognomy—skin color, hair texture, and facial features presumed to be evidence of cultural deficiency. Not until the gaze of European travelers fell upon them would African women see themselves, or indeed one another, as defined by “racial” characteristics. In a sense, European racial ideology developed in isolation from those who became the objects of racial scrutiny, but ideologies about race would soon come to be as important to the victims of racial violence as it was to the perpetrators. For English slaveowners in the Americas, neither the decision to embrace the system of slavery nor the racialized notion of perpetual hereditary slavery was natural. During the decades after European arrival to the Americas, as various nations gained and lost footholds, followed fairytale rivers of gold, traded with and decimated Native inhabitants, and ignored and mobilized Christian notions of conversion and just wars, English settlers constructed an elaborate edifice of forced labor on the foundation of emerging categories of race and reproduction. The process of calling blackness into being and causing it to become inextricable from brute labor took place in legislative acts, laws, wills, bills of sale, and plantation inventories just as it did in journals and adventurers’ tales of travels. Indeed, the gap between intimate experience (the Africans with whom one lived and worked) and ideology (monstrous, barely human savages) would be bridged in the hearts and minds of prosaic settlers rather than in the tales of worldly adventurers.¹ It was the settlers whose ideas and praxis African women and men would have to scrutinize and navigate in order to survive. Nonetheless, I turn here to travel narratives to explore developing categories of race and racial slavery and to provide a grounding for the discussion of behaviors and materialities that follow. The process by which “Africans” became “blacks” who became “slaves” was initiated—on the European side at least—through a series of encounters made manifest in literary descriptions and only later expanded by the quotidian dimensions of slaveownership and settlement. The publication of images fueled the imaginations of settlers and would-be colonists alike and constituted an essential component of the ideological arsenal that European settlers brought to bear against African laborers.

The connections between forced labor and race became increasingly important during the life of the transatlantic slave trade as the enormity of the changes wrought by the settlement of the Americas and the mass enslavement of Africans slowly came into focus for Europeans. Despite real contemporary issues of race and racism, however, the link between what race has come to mean and the wide range of emerging ideas about difference in the early modern period must not be overdetermined. A concept of “race” rooted firmly in biology is primarily a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century phenomenon.² Nonetheless, the fact that a biologically driven explanation for differences borne on the body owes considerable debt to the science of the Enlightenment should not erase the connection between the body and socially inscribed categories of difference in the early modern period. As travelers and men of letters thought through the thorny entanglements of skin color, complexion, features, and hair texture, they constructed weighty notions of civility, nationhood, citizenship, and manliness on the foundation of the amalgam of nature and culture. Given the ways in which appearance became a trope for civility and morality, it is no surprise to find gender located at the heart of Europeans’ encounter with and musings over the connection between bodies and Atlantic economies.

In June 1647, Englishman Richard Ligon left London on the ship Achilles to establish himself as a planter in the newly settled colony of Barbados. En route, Ligon’s ship stopped in the Cape Verde islands for provisions and trade. There Ligon saw a black woman for the first time. He recorded the encounter in his True and Exact History of Barbadoes: she was a “Negro of the greatest beauty and majesty together: that ever I saw in one woman. Her stature large, and excellently shap’d, well favour’d, full eye’d, and admirably grac’d . . . [I] awaited her comming out, which was with far greater Majesty and gracefulness, than I have seen Queen Anne, descend from the Chaire of State.”³ Ligon’s rhetoric must have surprised his English readers, for seventeenth-century images of black women did not usually evoke the monarchy as the referent.

Early modern English writers did, however, conventionally set the black female figure against one that was white—and thus beautiful. Scholars of early modern England have noted the discursive place of black women: Peter Erickson calls the image of the black woman a trope for disrupted harmony; Lynda Boose sees black women in early modern English writing as symbolically “unrepresentable,” embodying a deep threat to patriarchy; Kim Hall finds early modern English literature and material culture fully involved with a gendered racial discourse committed to constructing stable categories of whiteness and blackness.⁴ As these and other scholars have shown, male travelers to Africa and the Americas contributed to a European discourse about women that was already fully active by the time Barbados became England’s first colony wholly committed to slave labor in the midseventeenth century. While descriptions of naked native females evoked desire, travelers depicted black women as simultaneously unwomanly and marked by a reproductive value that was both dependent on their sex and evidence of their lack of femininity. Writers mobilized femaleness alongside an unwillingness to allow African women to embody “proper” female space, which in turn produced a focus for the notion of racial difference. And thus, over the course of his journey, Richard Ligon came to another view of black women. He wrote that their breasts “hang down below their Navels, so that when they stoop at their common work of weeding, they hang almost to the ground, that at a distance you would think they had six legs.” In this context, black women’s monstrous bodies symbolized their sole utility—the ability to produce both crops and other laborers.⁵ It is this dual value, sometimes explicit and sometimes lurking in the background of slaveowners’ decision-making processes, that would come to define women’s experience of enslavement most critically.

Seemingly because of his appraisal of beauty on Cape Verde, Ligon’s attitude toward the enslaved has been characterized by modern historians as “more liberal and humane than [that] of the generality of planters.”⁶ Nevertheless, his text indicates the kind of symbolic work required of black women in early modern English discourse. As Ligon penned his manuscript while in debtors prison in 1653, he constructed a layered narrative in which the discovery of African women’s monstrosity helped to assure the work’s success. Taking the female body as a symbol of the deceptive beauty and ultimate savagery of blackness, Ligon allowed his readers to dally with him among beautiful black women, only to seductively disclose their monstrosity over the course of the narrative. Ligon’s narrative is a microcosm of a much larger ideological maneuver that juxtaposed the familiar with the unfamiliar—the beautiful woman who is also the monstrous laboring beast. As the tenacious and historically deep roots of racialist ideology become more evident, it becomes clear also that, through the rubric of monstrously “raced” African women, Europeans found a way to articulate shifting perceptions of themselves as religiously, culturally, and phenotypically superior to the black or brown persons they sought to define. In the discourse used to justify the slave trade, Ligon’s beautiful Negro woman was as important as her “six-legged” counterpart. Both imaginary women marked a gendered and, as Kim Hall has argued, a stabilized whiteness on which European colonial expansionism depended.⁷

Well before the mid-seventeenth-century publication of Ligon’s work, New World and African narratives had been published in England and Europe that used gender to convey an emerging notion of racialized difference. By the time English colonists arrived in the Americas, they already possessed the ethno-historiographical tradition of depicting imaginary “natives” in which Ligon’s account is firmly situated.⁸ Travel accounts, which had proved their popularity by the time Ligon’s History of Barbados appeared, relied on gendered notions of European social order to project African cultural disorder. Gender did 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. White men who laid the discursive groundwork on which the “theft of bodies” could be justified relied on mutually constitutive ideologies of race and gender to affirm Europe’s legitimate access to African labor.⁹

Travel accounts produced in Europe and available in England provided a corpus from which subsequent writers borrowed freely, reproducing images of Native American and African women that resonated with readers. Over the course of the second half of the seventeenth century, some eighteen new collections with descriptions of Africa and the West Indies were published and reissued in England; by the eighteenth century, more than fifty new synthetic works, reissued again and again, found audiences in England.¹⁰ Both the writers and the readers of these texts learned to dismiss the idea that women in the Americas and Africa might be innocuous or unremarkable. Rather, indigenous women bore an enormous symbolic burden, as writers from Walter Ralegh to Edward Long used them to mark metaphorically the symbiotic boundaries of European national identities and white supremacy. The conflict between perceptions of beauty and assertions of monstrosity such as Ligon’s exemplified a much larger process through which the familiar became unfamiliar as beauty became beastliness and mothers became monstrous, all of which ultimately buttressed racial distinctions. Writers who articulated religious and moral justifications for the slave trade simultaneously grappled with the character of a contradictory female African body—a body both desirable and repulsive, available and untouchable, productive and reproductive, beautiful and black. By the time an eighteenth-century Carolina slaveowner could look at an African woman with the detached gaze of an investor, travelers and philosophers had already subjected her to a host of taxonomic calculations. The meanings attached to the female African body were inscribed well before the establishment of England’s colonial American plantations, and the intellectual work necessary to naturalize African enslavement—that is, the development of racialist discourse—was deeply implicated by gendered notions of difference and human hierarchy.

Europe had a long tradition of identifying Others through the monstrous physiognomy or sexual behavior of women. Armchair adventurers might shelve Pliny the Elder’s ancient collection of monstrous races, Historia Naturalis, which catalogued the long-breasted wild woman, alongside Herodotus’s History, in which Indian and Ethiopian tribal women bore only one child in a lifetime.¹¹ They may have read Julian’s arguments with Augustine in which he wrote that “barbarian and nomadic women give birth with ease, scarcely interrupting their travels to bear children,” or have pondered over Aristotle’s belief that Egyptian women had too many children and were therefore inclined to give birth to monsters.¹² Images of female devils included sagging breasts as part of the iconography of danger and monstrosity. The medieval wild woman, whose breasts dragged on the ground when she walked and could be thrown over her shoulder, was believed to disguise herself with youth and beauty in order to enact seductions that would satisfy her “obsessed . . . craving for the love of mortal men.”¹³ The shape of her body marked her deviant sexuality and both shape and sexuality evidenced her savagery.

Writers commonly looked to socio-sexual deviance to indicate savagery in Europe and easily applied similar modifiers to Others in Africa and the Americas in order to mark European boundaries. According to The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, “in Ethiopia and in many other countries [in Africa] the folk lie all naked . . . and the women have no shame of the men.” Furthermore, “they wed there no wives, for all the women there be common . . . and when [women] have children they may give them to what man they will that hath companied with them.”¹⁴ Deviant sexual behavior reflected the breakdown of natural laws—the absence of shame, the inability to identify lines of heredity and descent. This concern with deviant sexuality, articulated almost always through descriptions of women, is a constant theme in the travel writings of early modern Europe. Explorers and travelers to the New World and Africa brought expectations of distended breasts and dan...