Special issue of Women’s History Review—Mothering slaves: motherhood, childlessness and the care of children in Atlantic slave societies

Abstract

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.

‘Dreaming Has a Share in History’: Biding Time in the Work of Lubaina Himid

“…As Camilla Cowling and others have demonstrated, 'enslaved women's ability to bear children was central to property holding in persons because enslaved status was inherited through the maternal line'. 24 Plantation slavery especially perpetuated reproductive violence against Black women's bodies to the point of abjection. Children of enslaved mothers conceived through rape and coercion, rather than choice or bourgeois convention, present a disjunctive relationship within Western psychoanalytic frameworks of the nuclear family.…”

“My Daddy…He Was a Good Man”: Gendered Genealogies and Memories of Enslaved Fatherhood in America’s Antebellum South

“…Slavery, as Johnson emphasised, was a "story of separated lovers and broken families, of widows, widowers, and orphans left in the wake of the trade" (Johnson 1999, p. 41). Increasingly, as historians tell it, it has become a story largely about mothers (White 1985;Frankel 1999;Lindquist 2011, p. 220;Cowling et al 2018;West and Shearer 2018;West 2018;Glymph 2020), and yet, this was not necessarily the narrative that former slaves recounted to their WPA interviewers.…”

Género, raza y clase en la formación de un mercado de trabajo capitalista. Las amas de leche de Montevideo (1852-1890)

“…a actuar como amas de leche de los hijos de sus amos. 8 Esta temática también ha sido estudiada en extenso por la historiografía brasileña en el marco de los estudios sobre la historia social de la esclavitud. Los estudios se han sucedido para diferentes ciudades y momentos históricos, aunque no se ha puesto el foco en lo ocurrido con el trabajo de ama de leche en la post-abolición.…”