Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

Chapter 5. ‘‘Women’s Sweat’’: Gender and Agricultural Labor in the Atlantic World

Chapter 5 ‘‘Women’s Sweat’’: Gender and Agricultural Labor in the Atlantic World While enslaved women grappled with the new dimensions and implications of their reproductive lives, they undertook considerable and onerous agricultural work.1 The preceding two chapters have emphasized the connectedness of reproduction and enslavement by exploring the ways in which reproduction functioned foundationally in the development of racialist thinking, the onset of modern slaveownership, and the experience of enslavement. These chapters preceded a discussion of manual labor because in order to fully appreciate the degrees to which sex and gender infused the development of racial slavery, one must momentarily isolate the ideological and material valences of reproductive potential, of childbirth and loss, and of the multiplicities of ‘‘women’s work’’ for the daughters of Africa. Early American slavery was fully imbued with assumptions about and measures taken against African women’s gendered bodies. Slaveowners came to understand racial slavery as well as plantation management through a series of images, calculations, and experiences in which the notions of sex and race were fully intertwined. Enslaved women, and men too, from the moment they set foot aboard slave ships or were born in American colonies, came to understand their identity under slavery as marked by sex and race. It is from this point then, that we move on to a discussion of agricultural work, for to fully understand the role of reproduction in the lives of enslaved women, one must grasp the role of grueling work regimes for women who also suffered under the onslaught of this most fundamental appropriation of their labor. Hard labor, daily and relentless, underlaid all ideologies of race and reproduction and all experiences of birth, parenting, and loss under slavery. The obscene logic of racial slavery defined reproduction as work, and the work of the colonies—creating wealth out of the wilderness—relied on the Gender and Agricultural Labor in the Atlantic World 145 appropriation of enslaved women’s children by colonial slaveowners. But, at the risk of stating the obvious, reproductive work did not alone define daily life. The effort of reproducing the labor force occurred alongside that of cultivating crops. And even as enslaved women engaged in a process of community formation that was simultaneously resistant and acquiescent and ultimately the inevitable byproduct of their dispossession and oppression , they struggled to protect their bodies and their spirits from the ravages of unrelenting hard labor. An overdetermined connection between women and the domestic has dominated the ways we think about women’s work. The very phrase conjures the domestic—cleaning, childcare, food preparation—and inevitably leans in the direction of the family. Images of enslaved female house servants tend to populate the collective imaginary with as much tenacity as do gentle-hearted mammies. But as slaveowners perused the bodies of their newly purchased human property, they quickly made decisions about the kind of work each was capable of performing and in almost all cases put women to work cultivating land. To be exempted from the field in favor of the house was a fate open to very few enslaved women, particularly in the colonial period, when the luxury of large houses and the niceties of china, silver, and fine furniture were still part of the slaveowners’ imaginary future rather than their tangible present. It was far more likely that women would end up in the fields. Indeed, the entire system of hereditary racial slavery depended on slaveowners’ willingness to ignore cultural meanings of work that had been established in England and to make Africans work in ways the English could not conceive of working themselves.2 Once slaveowners received almost equal numbers of African men and women from slave traders , they inverted the gender ideology that they applied to white women and work.3 As more and more enslaved persons were brought to the Americas , African women and girls found themselves in the fields. Early American slaveowners felt no compunction about using women for this kind of hard labor. As Thomas Nairne calculated the cost to the crown of sponsoring settlers to Carolina in the first decade of the eighteenth century, he speculated on the wealth that would be produced by transported settlers. ‘‘I will suppose for the present, that white Women and Children are of no Advantage (tho’ tis not altogether so) and only reckon Men fit to Labour, and the Slaves of both Sexes.’’4 During the crucial frontier period of slavery in the mid-eigthteenth-century Georgia lowcountry...