Since 1808, when the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson published his History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, historians have focused their attention on the economic and political factors and the moral and commercial imperatives leading to the abolition of the slave trade and, ultimately, to the demise of the Atlantic slave system. Sasha Turner's important new book, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica, places the reproductive bodies of enslaved women at the center of this ongoing historiographical debate. Turner examines shifting views of pregnancy, motherhood, and child care between the emergence of abolitionist agitation in the 1780s and full emancipation in the 1830s, a transitional period that she argues not only politicized enslaved women's bodies and reproductive lives but also transformed the lived experience of slavery in Jamaica.
According to Turner, beginning in the 1780s both abolitionists’ pro-natal reforms and the capitalist motives of planters hinged on the reproductive potential of slave women. However, despite a shared fixation on enslaved women's bodies and reproductive practices, the strategic and moral objectives of abolitionists did not align neatly with slave owners’ immediate economic interests. While abolitionists articulated arguments focused on the need for slave women to give birth to a new generation of slaves, who would be separated from their mothers at a young age and socialized to embrace Christian values on the path toward freedom and citizenship, planters sought simultaneously to encourage biological reproduction and to maximize plantation labor and profits. Abolitionists’ insistence on labor exemptions for pregnant women and new mothers, and calls for a moratorium on harsh punishments such as flogging, led to a conflict “between reform ideology and practical implementation,” as masters continued to treat pregnant women and mother-workers as they saw fit (110). For planters long accustomed to replenishing their enslaved workforces through the transatlantic slave trade rather than through biological reproduction, pregnancy, and child care distracted from the business of plantation productivity and profitability. As the value of enslaved women's reproductive capacity increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, planters reassessed the importance of breeding, initiating a series of unwelcome interventions in the sexual and parental lives of their captive workers.
Using a wide variety of sources, including abolitionist tracts, medical treatises, parliamentary debates, planter correspondence, and Jamaican plantation records, Turner pushes beyond the archival silences to show how enslaved women responded to and often resisted attempts by reformers, planters, and physicians to control their reproductive lives and undermine their maternal authority. Contested Bodies makes a significant contribution to the histories of slavery, gender, and abolition by emphasizing the extent to which struggles over reproduction and neonatal care affected absolutely everyone involved in the slave system, from enslaved men, women, and children to owners, plantation managers, and physicians. Slave women had their own individual and community customs surrounding pregnancy, maternity, infant care, and family life and did not simply acquiesce to the gendered, parental, and medical roles thrust upon them by white men. Moreover, as Turner shows, the intensive focus on enslaved women's reproductive lives, coupled with the introduction of piecemeal reforms on the plantations, created opportunities for enslaved laborers to bargain for greater allowances and challenge their masters in court.
Each chapter looks at distinct aspects of enslaved women's reproductive practices in colonial Jamaica, analyzing the contests that evolved between abolitionists, slave owners, physicians, and captive laborers as each attempted to manage pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care in accordance with his or her own ends. Chapter one details how capitalizing on women's reproductive potential lay at the heart of pro-natal plans proposed by abolitionists, which entailed curtailing lactation and severing ties between mother and child in order to prepare the next generation of slaves for freedom. Turner shows how pro-natalism obliged reformers to convince the British public that children born to enslaved mothers, if acculturated to British cultural norms, morality, and work habits, were capable of improvement. Chapters 2 and 3 are devoted to planter strategies for breeding new workers and to the uneven impact of pro-natalism on slave women as a result of their age, perceived ethnic origin, and skin color.
Turner turns to competing views of maternal health care, Afro-Caribbean and European medicine, and neonatal care in chapters 4 and 5, showing how slave women exercised informal power by seeking to retain a measure of control over childbirth and childrearing. Chapters 6 and 7 are concerned with tracing the limitations placed on maternal authority and maternal contact—through debates over naming, breastfeeding and weaning, and the punishment of children, for example—and the responses of slave women and children to these impositions. Mother-workers and enslaved caregivers in Jamaica, Turner concludes, frequently engaged in “maternal resistance” (203). Cognizant of their growing significance as mothers and caregivers to future generations of slaves, enslaved women ran away, pleaded infirmity, encouraged their children or the children of others to flee, bargained with their masters, and took legal action. Above all, slave women strove to preserve their bodily and maternal autonomy in the face of abolitionists and planters’ moral, reproductive, and disciplinary reforms.
Like Jennifer Morgan's Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (2004) and Daina Ramey Berry's The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017), Turner focuses our attention on the bodies and lived experiences of enslaved women. As mothers, laborers, caregivers, community leaders, and rebels, slave women in Jamaica were aware of their immense value both to their owners and to British imperial and commercial ambitions. Consequently, enslaved women at once pushed back against and took advantage of pro-natal reforms as a means of retaining control over their bodies, families, and lives. Contested Bodies is a timely piece of scholarship that will be required reading for scholars and students interested in Atlantic slavery, abolition, gender and empire, and the British Caribbean.
