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Reviews in American History 33.1 (2005) 41-46



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Enslaved African Women in the Minds of English Men and in English Colonial America

Jennifer L. Morgan. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xvi + 279 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

In Laboring Women, Jennifer Morgan argues that enslaved women's reproductive labor was central, both symbolically and demographically, to the development and maintenance of slavery in early English America. "[T]he contradictory consequences of childbirth under slavery" underlay "the entire framework of slavery" in early English colonies (p. 11). This was so for multiple reasons: because enslaved women's reproductive labor produced wealth for slave-owners, because the definition of slavery as heritable only mattered in light of reproductive labor that women performed, because African and African American women's reproduction lay at the base of European men's justifications for slavery, and because reproduction also lay at the heart of the creolization process for enslaved Africans (as for everyone) in the Americas. While reproduction is at the heart of her study, Morgan places her examination of reproduction in the context of demographic evidence that enslaved women's physical labor counted for a large proportion of the agricultural production in colonial English slave societies. Thus, Morgan concludes, as a result of their sheer numbers and as a result of the importance of their reproductive labor for both increasing the enslaved labor force and for allowing Anglo-American men to create racial ideology to accompany the expansion of slavery, women and gender must be at center of any study of American slavery. Basing her work on a close examination of Barbados and Carolina in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, she applies her findings to English colonial America more broadly.

Morgan begins with the most symbolic use of women's reproductive labor, a choice that she makes consciously, although with reservations. Her exploration of "Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology" uses travel literature to examine European men's evolving beliefs that African women were inherently different from European women.1 Most [End Page 41] important was their construction of the notion that African women gave birth without pain, and therefore existed outside the biblical curse of Eve. To male European observers, that perceived difference marked a gulf dividing African women from European women that was crucial to European men's ability to regard African women as potential enslaved agricultural laborers, a category that their beliefs about gender did not permit them to apply generally to European women (despite the reality of European women's agricultural work.) Moreover, their supposed ability to give birth without pain meant that childbirth would not interrupt African women's ability to labor in the fields. Observation (and invention, in many cases) of African women who "Could Suckle over Their Shoulder" also served to convince European male observers that African women, unlike European women, could perform reproductive and agricultural labor at the same time. Morgan does not consider whether such European attitudes toward African women applied in any way to English ideas about the enslavability of African men. While Morgan intends her study to provide a corrective to a historiography of American slavery that continues to focus on enslaved African men, it would be worth considering whether her arguments that European men's specific ideas about African women's enslavability ought to change what we know about European men's willingness to enslave African men.

Morgan moves in the second chapter to a very different kind of analysis, using the demography of the transatlantic slave trade and a consideration of women's roles in West African societies to explore how gender shaped women's experiences of enslavement. Here Morgan pulls together the work of various historians in order to describe women's place in the transatlantic slave trade. Her presentation of this synthesis is often illuminating. When she considers David Eltis and Stanley Engerman's findings...

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