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  • The History of Women and Slavery: Considering the Impact of Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South on the Twentieth Anniversary of Its Publication:Introduction
  • Jennifer L. Morgan (bio)

The five articles collected here were presented in June 2005 at the 13th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women at Scripps College in Claremont, California, at a roundtable panel entitled "The History of Women and Slavery: Considering the Impact of Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South on the 20th Anniversary of its Publication." All of us assembled on this panel, myself included, owe an enormous intellectual debt to Deborah Gray White. On the one hand, the panel was a celebration of Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman?—a text that in many ways inaugurated an entire field. On the other hand, it was a space for recognizing the challenges of historical investigations in a field in which so many misapprehensions continue to inform our work and our teaching; all of us who write the histories of African American women have needed Ar'n't I a Woman? The text stands as evidence of the possible: of what we—representative of the generation that follows White—might be capable of, and of what we want to convey to our students. Ar'n't I a Woman? is a text that remains alive. It informs our work in an active way, in a way that twenty years later continues to push our analytical frames and our archival explorations.

Jennifer L. Morgan

Jennifer L. Morgan is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Her research examines the intersections of gender and race in colonial America. She is currently at work on a project that considers colonial numeracy, racism, and the rise of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, tentatively titled Accounting for the Women in Slavery. She is associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the Department of History at New York University and lives in New York City.

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