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  • Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation by Emily West
  • Tatiana van Riemsdijk
Enslaved Women in America: From Colonial Times to Emancipation. By Emily West. African American History Series. (Lanham, Md., and other cities: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Pp. [x], 157. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4422-0871-1.)

It is an impossible task: writing a history of enslaved women in America from colonial settlement to emancipation in 101 pages, plus thirty-nine [End Page 407] pages of selected primary documents. Yet this is the mandate of Rowman and Littlefield’s African American History Series, begun in 2003 and to date a collection of fifteen volumes. Author Emily West knows this material well, having published extensively on the family lives of enslaved and free black women in antebellum America.

West starts with the Atlantic slave trade, placing mainland American slavery in the context of Caribbean and Brazilian slavery and explaining marriage customs, gender roles, and child-rearing practices that women brought with them from West African nations. The singularly traumatic and deadly trip across the Atlantic, plus “seasoning” in New World slave regimes, disrupted women’s abilities to space births, safeguard infant survival, and protect their bodies from assault.

Enslaved women in mainland America reproduced rapidly, setting the stage for the natural increase in the slave population that distinguished the North American slave regime from others. However, West incorrectly states that American-born slaves outnumbered African-born slaves only after the Revolution, later adding that closure of the slave trade in 1808 heightened masters’ interest in reproduction. In reality, American-born slaves outnumbered Africans in Virginia by 1730 and in South Carolina by 1750.

West focuses on the distinctive experiences of slave women as both producers and reproducers. Her thorough grasp of material from Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews from the 1930s, as well as published autobiographies, provides a full and detailed social history of slave women’s lives as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters. She shows that women performed gender-specific work for masters as midwives, cooks, seamstresses, domestic servants, and childminders, while she also identifies two regional variations that shaped women’s working and community lives: the task labor system in the Carolinas and the gang labor system in Virginia. Other key points include the gender-specific nature of slave resistance and outcomes of emancipation.

In West’s discussion of slave regimes shaped by Catholicism, she makes generalizations. For example, West attributes Brazil’s large free black population to the church’s encouragement of manumission, downplaying the importance of a slave’s right to self-purchase. The same was true in Louisiana. Additionally, West says there were more interracial marriages in colonial Louisiana than elsewhere, but she must mean interracial couples because interracial marriage was illegal in Louisiana, although priests could marry enslaved couples with the slaveholder’s permission.

This volume also leaves out the experiences of women in the Indian slave trade. During the seventeenth-century Iroquoian wars, many women were enslaved, while in the eighteenth century the Westos and the Yamasee Indians systematically depopulated Native nations in Georgia and Florida because captives were more valuable than deerskins on the Carolina coast. Despite these issues, this volume would be a suitable introduction to slavery for first- or second-year undergraduates. And not to be overlooked, the primary documents section includes a number of well-chosen WPA interviews: they are vivid material for lively class discussions. [End Page 408]

Tatiana van Riemsdijk
University of British Columbia
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