Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. For connections around and across the Atlantic, see Julius S. Scott, ‘‘The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002). For an overview of some of the larger themes of the Atlantic as a space of historical inquiry see David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500– 1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 2. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Cultivation and Culture : Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993). 3. Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations : Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 4. David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96. 5. I take as a starting point Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat, 1978), but one could look back to Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology (New York: New American Library, 1970); Joyce Ladner, Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (New York: Doubleday, 1971); Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972); and Angela Y. Davis, ‘‘Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,’’ Black Scholar 3 (December 1971): 2–15. 6. Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham, ‘‘Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History,’’ Gender & History 1 (1989): 50–67, 50. 7. For works on the linkages between race and gender, see bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Angela Y. 204 Notes to Pages 5–10 Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, ‘‘African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,’’ Signs 17 (Winter 1992): 251–74; Elsa Barkley Brown, ‘‘Polyrythms and Improvisations : Lessons for Women’s History,’’ History Workshop Journal 31 (Spring 1991): 85–90; and ‘‘‘What Has Happened Here’: The Politics of Difference in Women’s History and Feminist Politics,’’ Feminist Studies 18 (Summer 1992): 295–311. For studies of women in slavery, see Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1985); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1988); and Bernard Moitt, Slave Women in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). These six are the only book-length studies of women in slavery to date. 8. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches. 9. Fischer, Suspect Relations. For more of this kind of scholarship, see the works of Sharon Block, ‘‘Coerced Sex in British North America, 1700–1820,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1995; Jennifer Spear, ‘‘‘Whiteness and the Purity of Blood’: Race, Sexuality, and Social Order in Colonial Louisiana,’’ Ph.D. dissertation , University of Minnesota, 1999; and Juliana Barr, ‘‘The ‘Seductions’ of Texas: The Political Language of Gender in the Conquests of Texas, 1690–1803,’’ Ph.D. dissertation , University of Wisconsin, 1999. 10. Hazel V. Carby, ‘‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,’’ in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1982), reprinted in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston...