Newcastle University

Sarah L. Franklin, University of North Alabama

“Motherhood and Slavery in Cuba”

In nineteenth-century Cuba, the advent of the slave society in the years following the Haitian Revolution had dramatic consequences for women.  Patriarchy served as a tool of order, largely through discursive language and practice, espousing of social ideals, and exhortations about women’s behavior. Yet, those prescriptions for white women could not be extended unilaterally to women of color. In many ways, their existence was oppositional. White women were virtuous and infused with honor; according to the prevalent discourse, black women were not. They were lustful, without honor, and their lot was to labor. However, motherhood itself appeared as both a central tenet of the system, and arguably, its greatest threat. White women and black women could all be mothers. Enslaved women might not be able to attain honor or virtue through motherhood, at least in the eyes of whites, but they could and did give birth to their own children. Moreover, they often “mothered” the young white children of Cuba, as seen mostly clearly in their role as wet nurses. Consequently, historians are left to question how these two distinct oppositional positions can be reconciled under the umbrella of nineteenth-century Cuban patriarchy. As both slaves and women, they occupied the lowest rung in Cuba’s hierarchy, and mothering cannot be divorced from order and its maintenance.

 

Angela Davis, University of Warwick

Themes in British and European maternity care since 1700

From the eighteenth century onwards competition stepped up between female midwives and male accoucheurs or men-midwives. Male practitioners, armed with their new claims to authority and their obstetric instruments, began to criticise midwives for their traditional approaches and lack of formal training and to take over attendance at childbirth. By the turn of twentieth century, the location of childbirth had increasingly moved from home to hospital and struggles continued to establish authority and, for midwives, legal recognition. In the second half of the twentieth century hospital as the location for birth was firmly established and associated with this new birthing space were new childbirth technologies. During the latter decades of the 20thC hospitals provided a hi-tech, highly medicalised birthing experience. In this paper I will show how the practice and development of maternal care has centred on a number of questions, namely: is there such a thing as a normal pregnancy and labour. If so, where should the ‘normal woman’ give birth; who should look after her; how much medical intervention should occur; and should attention focus on the mother or child.  Implicit in discussions about maternal care is whether pregnancy and childbirth should be medical questions at all. I will investigate the changing status of midwives and medical men; how childbirth went from being viewed as a traditional, female activity to a medical event; changing cultural and social practices surrounding childbirth; and how mothers themselves experienced these developments.

 

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Universidade de São Paulo

Slave mothers: hidden images in the paintings of Nicolas-Antoine Taunay.

Nicolas-Antoine Taunay was a very well-known painter from the Academy of France during the Napoleonic years. A friend of Rousseau’s, he was raised in the philosophy of the Enlightenment and participated in the first years of the Revolution. In 1816, he had to move to Brazil and tried to make sense of his new reality. In his paintings, he depicted, on the one hand, the beautiful nature of the tropics. On the other hand, however, Taunay showed serious difficulty in dealing with slavery. Always painted very small, slaves were like tiny details amidst a huge nature: almost a paradise . But there was another paradox: if men were depicted always working, the slave mothers seemed to be shown as examples of liberty. The slave system, and in particular the "black nannies," were in essence a contradiction for a man of the Age of Reason. In this paper, we are going to analyze some of Taunay’s paintings – from the French ones to the Brazilians ones – in order to understand the complexities and issues that underscored the artistic process for Taunay to bring these images to life.

 

 

 

Rebecca Winer, Villanova University

The Enslaved Wet-nurse as Nanny: Positing a transition from free to slave Labor in late medieval Spain

The ecclesiastical, medical, and natural philosophical authorities of medieval Spain dicated that the ideal wet nurse was a married Christian matron. Breastmilk was understood to form the infant’s growing body and influence the soul thus it was forbidden for non-Christians to breast-feed Christian children.  Documents of practice from Barcelona during the fourteenth century reveal that the wealthy and powerful were able to secure services of freeborn women. Getting free women to remain in service as wetnurses was difficult, however, even for the elite, since these women sought to return to their families. Enslaved wetnurses could not leave service. The baptism of slaves was a desideratum and the demand for their breastmilk an added impetus. The evidence for breast-feeding on the ground can reveal how the desire for a freeborn nanny of good character weighed in practice against the need for the reliable supply of breastmilk that an enslaved woman could provide. In the first half of the fourteenth century breast-feeding employment contracts from Barcelona far outnumber documents related to slavery and wet nursing. By 1400 this trend is reversed. While this could be an effect of the type of documentation, it seems more likely that the record preserves an actual trend whereby enslaved wetnurses became increasingly common as slavery became more widespread. The shift in practice to relying on enslaved wetnurses over their free counterparts has potential ramifications for the rest of Iberia and thus the study of breast-feeding and slavery in colonial Latin America as well.

 

Maria Helena Machado, Universidade de São Paulo

Between Two Beneditos: Slave Wet-Nurses Amid Slavery’s Decline in Southeast Brazil

This article discusses a series of questions related to the presence of enslaved women (escravas), female slaves working toward contractual or bequeathed freedom (libertandas), and freedwomen (libertas) in the domestic sphere in the final years of slavery in Brazil, with an initial emphasis on the contradictions between medical and sanitarian discourses that promoted a new, bourgeois vision of the home and the continued existence of the master-slave relationship and tutelary relations derived therefrom in the most intimate spaces of wealthy households in the cities and towns of the country’s coffee-growing southeast.  The article also seeks to reconstruct the perspective of these captive and servant-class women at the moment of slavery’s extinction, thus providing a new perspective on the latter process by noting how the abolition of slavery was conditioned by the gendering of household work.  A reconstruction of the life of Ambrosina, a slave woman rented out by her owner to serve another family as a wet nurse, then accused of murder after the death of her young charge, is the means by which these contributions are made—the records of her trial providing rare documentary evidence of the lives and struggles of historical actors whose absence from the historical record stands in sharp contrast to their social importance in their day and the cultural importance of the mythmaking subsequently fashioned around them.

 

Emily West and Rosie Knight, University of Reading

 

Mother's Milk: enslaved wet-nursing in the US South

 

Enslaved women feeding their own milk to white infants represents a unique point at which the exploitation of female slaves as workers and as reproducers intersects. Wetnursing is a phenomenon that exists across time and space where women live in unequal power relationships, including for example, pre-revolutionary France and early modern England. Yet few historians of the United States have explored the practice in any depth. This paper, arising from a University of Reading Undergraduate Research Opportunities (UROP) programme that fed into Rosie’s PhD research, presents some of our preliminary findings on enslaved wetnurses in the antebellum United States. We stress white women’s use of wetnurses for reasons of convenience, and argue wetnursing sometimes had a detrimental influence on enslaved women’s health, and those of their own infant children. Slave women’s wetnursing drew considerable attention in the postbellum era, when advocates of the ‘lost cause’ promoted a ‘mammy’ stereotype of enslaved womanhood. This legacy fed into more recent interpretations of wetnursing which suggests the practice promoted cross-racial intimacies between black and white women. Instead, we contextualise wetnursing firmly within a spectrum of women’s exploitation where white women used their power as slave owners to oppress women they held in bondage and ‘revoked’ enslaved women’s motherhood.

 

Katherine Paugh, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Conceiving Fertility in the Age of Abolition: Slavery, Sexuality, and the Politics of Knowledge

The generation of knowledge about Afro-Caribbean sexuality exploded during the age of British abolition. As British Parliamentarians became concerned to promote fertility in order to offset the end of the Atlantic slave trade, information about the sexual habits, sexual diseases, and childbearing capacities of Afro-Caribbean women’s bodies acquired great political import. This knowledge was generated, not only by Parliamentary inquiries, but also by way of colonial practice. West Indian doctors and slave owners published treatises recounting their experiences, and these recollections were themselves forged in sometimes fractious encounters between these white Creole male authors and Afro-Caribbeans. This paper will examine the contested production of knowledge about Afro-Caribbean sexuality and fertility in plantation management and medical manuals written during the age of abolition.

 

Alexandra Cornelius, Florida International University

'The Offspring No Longer Needs the Care of the Mother': Race, Labor and Social Scientific Constructions of Black Motherhood

In his popular 1861 book, Negroes and Negro Slavery: The First Its Race; the Latter its Natural Condition,  John van Evrie  maintained that the enslaved woman “has always control and direction of her offspring at the South so long as that is needed by the latter.” The plantation owner, as the head of the workplace Van Evrie described as “home” at the right and the authority to determine the black child’s need for a mother. Conveniently for slaveholders, Van Evrie asserted, “the negro child, with its vastly greater approximation to the animal, is also less dependent at a certain age than the white child.” Moreover, he argued that as the child aged, mothers often cared little for their children, and children lost affection for their mothers. “A few years later,” he wrote, “and she forgets it altogether, for her affections corresponding with her intellectual nature, there is no basis, or material, or space for such things.” Such ethnologically derived presumptions implicitly made the trauma associated with the separation of enslaved mothers from their children trifling and inconsequential.

This paper provides a deliberately gendered analysis of the ways in which ethnological theories produced by scientists of race and proslavery pamphleteers supported the idea that black women were bereft of motherly instincts. Moreover, these anti-black theorists also asserted that black children were stronger and more mature than white children and, thus, better able to assume laboring responsibilities. Collectively, the work of anti-black theorists reveals -- in excruciating detail -- the formation of transatlantic, ideological constructs that eventually were employed to justify the daily physical and sexual exploitation of enslaved black women as well as the practice of forcing young children into labor.

This paper also delineates the coping mechanisms and resistance strategies employed among enslaved women who sought to find ways to mother their children-- many of whom were conceived in violence-- thus complicating further the enslaved mother/child relationship.

 

Mytheli Sreenivas, Ohio State University

Recasting Motherhood in the Era of Population Control: Examples from Postcolonial India

In the wake of Indian independence in 1947, population control became an increasingly important part of state-led economic development.  Women, especially poor women, were the primary targets of these efforts, and were subjected to surveillance and medical intervention to regulate their fertility.  This paper asks how contexts of invasive population control transformed conceptions of motherhood.  I focus on two sets of sources: (1) family planning propaganda that developed a small family ideal; (2) oral history interviews with women in rural Tamil Nadu who relied on state clinics for reproductive healthcare.  Bringing these sources together, I examine how state claims about the benefits of small families were received, translated, and recast by women who encountered state-sponsored family planning each time they sought medical care.  The paper focuses, in particular, on competing claims about the duties and responsibilities of mothers towards their children, their families, and their communities.

 

Lorena Silva Telles, Universidade de São Paulo

Slave women, breastfeeding and motherhood in nineteenth-century Brazil

This paper discusses the experiences and social tensions faced by enslaved domestic nursing mothers in nineteenth-century Brazil. This was a form of enslavement experienced exclusively by women in the domestic domain. Compulsory feeding entailed, from the perspective of slaves, the appropriation of their bodies as nursing mothers and their experiences of motherhood under slavery. The period between 1830 and 1888 ended a broad process of amendments regarding to the slave relationships, manifested, throughout the century, by the emergence of sanitary medical discourses in the 1830s, by the end of intercontinental trade, by the emancipation policy and the broader process of emancipations. All these factors led to the slow decline of domestic ownership of slaves since the 1850s. I intend to examine social practices regarding childbirth and the care of captive children, observing the tensions arising from the penetration of modernizing medical discourses into the domestic domain during the period of the breakdown of urban and domestic slavery. The paper will go beyond the description of the labor market and medical representations on nursing mothers expressed in medical theses, particularly focusing on the appropriation of the body of the captive as nurturer. I aim to achieve understanding of aspects of the slave experience in the domestic world such as pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. In addition, I will analyse the intricate relations that imbued the dialectical relationship between the master and the slave, observing their physical proximity, paternalism, the violence and the intimacy and restrictions imposed by probing the maternal faculty of the own slave.

 

 

Stephen Kenny, University of Liverpool

“Infantile therapeutics” in the slave South: an emerging field of medical research

Profit-seeking slaveholders across the Atlantic world took a keen interest in maximising black women’s reproductive capacity and in public discourse argued that the health of slave mothers and slave infants was one of their primary concerns. Yet, despite the rhetoric of paternalism and the appeal of the profits from human capital, in American slavery’s antebellum era infant and maternal mortality and morbidity rates were shockingly high. Richard Steckel’s research, for example, found that American slaves lost over half of all pregnancies to stillbirths, infant mortality, and early childhood mortality, due to poor diet, the impact of disease, degraded environmental conditions and inadequate welfare facilities. The care offered by orthodox southern physicians seems to have made little impact on these grim statistics. The human carnage wrought by slavery’s neglect and abuse of black health, however, presented white doctors with opportunities to advance personal, professional and political agendas. Focusing on a sample of case narratives published in leading medical periodicals, this paper explores what one Georgia physician described as “infantile therapeutics” in the slave South, a sub-field of medical research within the emerging discipline of ‘negro medicine’. The paper pays attention to the specific types of medical research undertaken by white southern doctors using slave children, examines how doctors gained access to children and secured permission to conduct therapeutic trials, and reflects on how child sufferers are framed in the case narratives, betraying the mind-sets of both enslavers and doctors.

 

Sasha Turner, Quinnipiac University

 Hot and cold baths [are] necessary to keep patients clean”: Cleanliness and the Health and Culture of Slave Mothers and Infants in Jamaica

 Abolitionists’ threats to shut down the African supply of laborers for British West Indian colonies prompted slaveholders to intervene in the intimate lives of enslaved women to force them to reproduce the slave population. In addition to reforming enslaved mothers’ work and punishment to facilitate pregnancy and childbirth, planters and doctors targeted birthing rituals, such as bathing, because they considered them dangerous and lethal to mothers and infants. They scrutinized and attempted to eradicate enslaved women’s washing habits because they believed that they contributed to the high infant mortality rates among Jamaican slaves.  Yet, the proposed reforms to slaves’ cleansing habits were far from uniform since the abolitionist era, circa, the 1780s to 1830s, also witnessed changing practices and views about washing the body. Medical authorities and reformers throughout the Atlantic World linked washing habits and techniques to physical health, civilization,  as well as moral and spiritual purity. Debates over and recommended methods of keeping the body clean therefore extended beyond prescriptions on how best to secure maternal and neonatal health in order to grow the slave population. Cleanliness also had implications for moral and spiritual health. In short, cleanliness became a new marker of how (un)civilized blacks were. Examining these conflicts over cleanliness provides new insights into how slaves were dominated and the nature of slaves’ culture.