did not list them. Unlike estate inventories that more consistently listed women and the number of children they bore, bookkeepers at Windsor pen simply listed Keatty Ebo’s occupation as “minding her children.” The same is true for Top Hill pen, where only one woman, fifty-two-year-old Moll, birthed “many children.” No such mothers existed in the records for Chippenham Park pen, where Diana and Molly bore four children each, but continued working.9
Population size did not always correlate with the number of women with large families, and in some cases, women on sugar estates bore few children. Merrywood estate had 79 women workers, four of whom bore between six and seven children. Windsor pen had a similar number of female workers (76), but only one woman birthed six children. On large properties like Wales and Lansquenet estates, which had at least 127 and 149 females each, there is no record of women bearing six or more children between 1798 and 1818.
It is difficult to pinpoint specifically why women working at the sugar estates bore more children than those at the satellite pens. One reason could be the sheer volume of female workers on individual properties. Of Tharp’s seven estates and three pens in 1818, Covey estate had the largest female population, registering 158 women, 12 of whom bore at least seven children. Good Hope estate had the second largest female population (154) and only five women birthed six or more children. Of these seven estates, women working at five of them had large families. Among Tharp’s three pens, only one woman between1708 and 1818 had a family of more than six children. This mother resided at Windsor pen, which had the largest female population of all three pens. Of Windsor pen’s 76 females, only one woman had a large enough family to earn her exemption from hard labor. At Chippenham Park and Top Hill pens, which had the smallest female populations of 26 and 28 women, respectively, only two women at the former property bore four children.10
Myriad reasons exist for the variation in the number of children born on individual properties. Although planter correspondence stressed placing potential mothers at pens, estate inventories showed that workers moved back and forth between pens and estates. During the sugar harvest in particular, planters reassigned pen workers to the estate to meet the excessive work demands. Thus unlike enslaved people who toiled on independent livestock pens those belonging to dual pen-sugar plantation units were not necessarily spared the peak in labor demands during the harvest, since estate mangers rotated workers between estates and pens.11 Age distribution, residential arrangements, and the ratio of Jamaican-born (Creole) to African-born workers also informed fertility differences on these properties. From 1824 to 1828, Old Montpelier estate and Shettlewood pen consistently had larger families than New Montpelier estate. The larger proportion of Creoles under age twenty-five at Old Montpelier and Shettlewood pen determined a more steady population growth than New Montpelier estate, which suffered rapid population decline due to its large aging African population.12 Whereas abolitionists had simply emphasized increasing the population of women, the Jamaican Assembly and local planters insisted on importing captive women and girls below age twenty-five because they calculated that the plantations had an excess of workers beyond childbearing years.
Abolitionists’ use of slave population growth as an index of slavery reform inevitably led them into conflict with planters because slaveholders could not fully control women’s fertility. Diet, disease, place of birth (Africa versus Jamaica), and women’s attitudes toward childbearing combined with hard work and punishment to determine demographic stability.13 Placing women on pens did not guarantee higher conception and birthrates because this combination of factors determined population growth rather than just the demanding labor of the fields.
Ongoing labor shortages plagued Jamaican sugar estates because of high mortality and morbidity rates, delayed arrival of slave ships, and the lack of capital to purchase new workers. These shortages meant that sheltering parturient women from plantation work was not regularly practiced or sustainable.14 By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, enslaved women formed the bulk of field workers on the majority of Jamaican sugar estates. Reassigning them from the fields to the pens en masse would have crippled the economy and potentially forced the plantations to collapse. As described in the Introduction, field work relied on a gang system where laborers worked in three different gangs according to perceived strength and stamina. The first gang was made up of the strongest men and women because they performed the most demanding work, like felling trees to prepare the land for planting, digging cane holes, and cutting, bundling, and carrying canes. The second gang consisted of young people aged fourteen to sixteen and workers weakened by advancing age or illness. The third gang was composed of disabled workers and children from ages five to twelve. Of all three field gangs, the third gang had the least strenuous work, like weeding and picking up foliage from harvested cane. On a typical plantation, women made up the majority of first- and second-gang workers.
Women not only outnumbered male field workers, the majority of the total female population were field workers. For example, at Mesopotamia estate from 1762 to 1831, at least 84 percent of the total female population were field workers, compared to 55 percent of males.15 Enslaved women dominated field labor because there were fewer specialized roles reserved for them. With the exception of domestic and health-care positions, like housekeepers, cooks, and midwives, women performed few skilled jobs. Men worked in specialized and supervisory roles, including drivers, craft workers, and stock keepers. At Mounthindermost plantation in 1831, for example, men exclusively held at least seven occupational categories.16
Field workers were usually the healthiest, most able-bodied workers ranging from ages fourteen to fifty-one, with a mean age of thirty. This age range overlapped closely with the ages at which women became mothers. The recorded ages of mothers at Worthy Park estate for the years 1784 to 1838, for example, reveal that women birthed children between ages nine and fifty-one, and had the same mean age of thirty as women field workers. Ironically, then, youthfulness, health, and vitality that permitted planters to exploit women as field workers were the same factors that marked their most fertile years. It is therefore unsurprising that the bulk of women who bore children were field workers. At John Tharp’s estates, most, and on some occasions all, mothers worked in field gangs. In 1818, of Covey’s eighty-nine women, ten field hands and only one domestic were pregnant. Similarly, at Wales estate, with the exception of one woman, Molly, all five expectant mothers were field workers. The same is true of Pantre Pant estate, where 14 percent of childbearing women were field workers. Simultaneously reassigning all eight expectant mothers would have slowed the productivity of the plantations, and Pantre Pant estate would have lost eight women workers in addition to the thirty other women who were described as “invalid [and] incapable of working.”17
Records of other Jamaican estates, like those belonging to Nathaniel Phillips, similarly show that pregnant women were typically field gang workers. At Phillips’s Pleasant Hill estate in 1789, of the seventy-seven women, fifty worked in the fields, four of whom were pregnant. Likewise at Phillipsfield estate, of the sixty-nine women, fifty-five labored in the fields, of whom eight were pregnant, one about to give birth.18 Given that the plantations depended on women as field workers and that these were the women most likely to bear children, Jamaican planters had to develop practical working solutions that allowed them to exploit the reproductive ability of women while minimizing production loss. The tension between fertility and productivity meant that parturient workers received minimal care to protect their unborn children without it being too costly to the labor needs of an estate.19 Enslaved women’s importance to field work meant that slaveholders adopted abolitionist proposals to relax the labor routines of mother-workers according to predicted consequences for the productivity of their plantations.
Field workers were vitally important to the sugar plantations, a status well reflected by their fiscal value. At Good Hope estate in 1804, all nine childbearing women were field workers with values in excess of £100. Expectant mothers attracted a price of £115 to £180, with a mean of £140, which was on par with prices for nonpregnant women laborers (£50-£180 with the same mean of £140).20 Most importantly, pregnant and nonpregnant female field workers had values that compared favorably with those of male field hands, which
