West, E. and Knight, R. J. (2017) Mothers' milk: slavery, wet nursing, and black and white women in the Antebellum South.under slavery it represented the point at which the exploitation of enslaved women as workers and as reproducers literally intersected. Feeding another woman's child with one's own milk constituted a form of labor, but it was work that could only be undertaken by lactating women who had borne their own children. As a form of exploitation specific to slave mothers, enforced wet-nursing constituted a distinct aspect of enslaved women's commodification. The evocative image of an enslaved wet nurse, carefully holding a white child to her breast in order to provide sustenance through her own milk, therefore holds much resonance for historians interested in gender, slavery, and relationships between black and white women in the antebellum South. Wet-nursing bound women together across the racial divide, and white women also sometimes wet-nursed enslaved infants. Yet ultimately, white women used wet-nursing as a tool to manipulate enslaved women's motherhood for slaveholders' own ends.This article evaluates patterns of wet-nursing in the antebellum South by locating the practice along a spectrum of gendered exploitation where enforced wet-nursing sits at one end, women's paid employment of "professional" wet nurses exists somewhere in the middle, and informal networks of support where women shared their breast milk lie at the other. Women in the antebellum South practiced forms of wet-nursing across this spectrum. Inextricably linked with ideologies of race, ethnicity, and class, historical patterns of exploitative wet-nursing have shaped contemporary distaste for the practice within the medical profession and elsewhere, even though informal networks of shared breast-feeding (for which little evidence survives) have probably been more common than has hitherto been recognized.
Slaveholders believed women could both labour and care for their children simultaneously, and they routinely exploited enslaved mothers as both workers and as reproducers. Using Stephanie Camp's conceptualization of enslaved women's bodies as sites of resistance, this article argues that despite slavery's arduousness motherhood provided a place of refuge for enslaved women to enjoy their children and the camaraderie of their peers. However, women sometimes lamented bringing enslaved children into the world and strove not to do so, especially when pregnancy resulted from sexual assault. Slavery's unique burdens meant many women participated in shared and more communal forms of mothering than their white counterparts.When the slave women were confined with the babies having to suck and they were too little to take to the fields, the mammies had to spin. I would take them the thread and bring it back to the house when it was spun. If they didn't spin seven or eight cuts a day they would get a whippin'. It was considerable hard on a woman when she had a baby. But every morning those babies had to be taken to the big house so that they white folks could see if they were dressed right. There was money tied up in little nigger young' uns. WPA respondent Cato Cater 1 Cato Carter's memories of slavery highlight the ways in which slaveholders maximized the profit-making opportunities generated by enslaved mothers. Only a young boy himself, Cato assumed responsibility for delivering thread for mothers with infant children to spin. Neither children nor postpartum mothers were spared the rigours of plantation labour. Throughout the Southern states slaveholders made pragmatic decisions about how best to work enslaved mothers who also needed to nurture their babies, and they commonly employed such women in more sedentary roles such as weaving and sewing. Slaveholders believed mothers could both labour and care for their children simultaneously, and Carter's comments also speak to the financial value of slave infants and children. Well aware of the future value of enslaved women's offspring, Carter's owners demanded that they see for themselves just how much care and attention enslaved women devoted to the appearance of their children.
Rio de Janeiro, 1845: Inácia, an enslaved woman, gives birth to triplets, attended by a white doctor at the request of her slaveholder. All her babies die during their first night. Havana, 1854: a formerly enslaved mother, Dolores Justiniani, petitions the authorities on behalf of her enslaved son, Narciso, to remove him from a rural plantation where he is being subjected to severe physical punishments. Texas, late antebellum era: Rose Williams' mistress threatens her with a 'whipping' if she does not bring forth 'portly children' with an enslaved man, Rufus, whom she dislikes. Rose relents and bears Rufus two children before leaving him after emancipation. These brief snapshots of the lives of women living in different Atlantic slave societies reflect the diversity and complexity involved in mothering under slavery. They underscore, first and foremost, the loss, abuse, and exploitation their protagonists experienced, but they also suggest their resilience and determination in seeking to practise motherhood on their own terms, even under the most painful of circumstances. The stories come to us from different historical moments and spaces, yet their compelling common elements also suggest a rich potential for thinking about motherhood and slavery in connected, comparative, and transnational ways. The articles in this collection, and the companion issue of Slavery & Abolition, together undertake this important task. 1 The articles in each special issue were originally presented at three conferences held by the 'Mothering Slaves' research network in the United Kingdom and Brazil in 2015 and 2016. 2 The network brought together scholars working on motherhood, the care of children, and childlessness in slave societies across the Atlantic World, as well as in medieval Europe, while other participants offered comparative perspectives on motherhood in nonslave settings. A key goal of the network was to engage with the extensive scholarship on the social history of slavery produced in recent decades in Brazil, the Americas' largest and longest-enduring slave society. Historians based both in Brazil and internationally, some of whose work is showcased in these two special editions, are now turning their attention to the intertwined history of gender and slavery, offering important comparative insights.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.