as “invalids,” “superannuated,” and “worthless.”22 Of the workers valued at Tharp’s estates in 1804, Mundingo Juliet’s condition of “breeding constantly” reduced her assessment from £170 to £115.23 While women’s child-bearing potential did not necessarily inflate or impair their marketability, their values fell more quickly after birthing many children. Numerous pregnancies were thought to weaken women’s physical stamina and therefore reduce their anticipated productivity and value.24
The importance of reproductively capable women to the sugar estates made it a huge financial liability to remove them from the fields as abolitionists proposed. Planters therefore put expectant mothers to work in less labor-intensive gangs, rather than grant them full exemption from the fields. Estates generally classified bonded workers in six major categories: drivers, domestics, craft workers, field workers, marginal workers, and non-workers, subdivided further according to particular skill or specific tasks. Craft workers included carpenters, masons, and smiths, while domestics were cooks, washers, and seamstresses.25 With the exception of Green Park estate, which listed “pregnancy” and “lying-in” in the occupation categories of its roll call, most sugar estate inventories listed “pregnancy” as the “condition” of workers, in the same way that they recorded illnesses. At best, they considered pregnancy as a factor that impaired the laboring ability of women temporarily. On some properties, planters placed pregnant women in the same gangs as workers suffering from other illnesses.26
One eyewitness, Maria Nugent, the Jamaican governor’s wife, claimed that while touring the island between 1802 and 1804, she saw “women with child work[ing] in the fields till the last six weeks” of their pregnancies (emphasis added).27 Nugent gave her readers no indications of the types of work pregnant women performed in the fields. Planters sometimes reassigned parturient workers to a variety of field-related tasks based on perceived difficulty. The proprietor of Cornwall estate, Matthew Lewis, instructed his attorney to discharge Cubina’s pregnant wife “from all severe labour” (emphasis added).28 Similarly, at Denbigh and Thomas River estates, the moment women were “under the suspicion of being with child” they were removed from the “harder labour of the field and put to light work” (emphasis added). They were reassigned to the “hoeing of fences” and “boiling of oils for the use on the estate.”29 Given that women of childbearing age dominated field work, and were as highly valued as able-bodied men, estate owners and attorneys hesitated to grant mother-workers full labor release. Planters attempted to balance their reproductive goals with their ongoing labor needs and financial investments by placing would-be mothers in work roles presumed to be less strenuous. Reproduction as a value-added commodity singled out childbearing workers from the mass of enslaved women.
As plantation owners sought to capitalize on the productive and reproductive capacities of female slaves, enslaved women became more vulnerable to the scrutiny and control of medical practitioners. Plantation physicians attended the general needs of the sick, and to a limited degree, they supervised labor, pregnancy, and delivery. Between 1741 and 1745, Jamaica had just twenty-four doctors and surgeons, which increased to twenty-six between 1771 and 1775. By 1795 the number of doctors doubled to fifty-six and their presence in the island continued expanding throughout the 1800s. With important exceptions, doctors were planter allies in the struggles to harness the reproductive potential of female slaves.30 Physicians like Benjamin Turney, who was contracted by Golden Grove estate, lived on the property and monitored the everyday health and labor of workers.
In addition to overseeing work performed by enslaved women and attending to medical emergencies, other doctors, like David Collins and William Sells, published general guidelines on how to regulate the labor demands on enslaved women to protect their pregnancies while capitalizing on their full labor potential.31 Sells believed that childbearing women could continue working in their customary roles until they were midway through their pregnancy. He wrote, “no alteration [is needed] in their usual labor until four or five months advanced.” After the fifth month, he recommended “a lighter employment … and continued until the lying in.” He did, however, advise planters to grant pregnant women time off from work during illness to give mothers and unborn children the best chance of recovery and survival.32 Sells’s advice published in 1817 might have been borrowed from observations of practices on properties like Lansquenet estate, where in 1804 Bess, a twenty-six-year-old mother-to-be, was allowed to remain home because of ill health.33
There is nothing to suggest that Bess received time off due to pregnancy alone, however. Sick workers commonly received work exemption, particularly when they suffered from contagious illnesses like smallpox. Planters had firsthand knowledge that epidemics could destroy harvests and wipe out populations, both free and enslaved. When the Georgia estate suffered from an influenza outbreak, it lasted from the end of December 1809 to March 1810. The disease was so widespread that the mill ground to a halt, and despite medical aid, the property lost several workers who died shortly after contracting the illness.34 It is quite possible that Bess, also identified as “diseased,” suffered from a highly communicable disease, and quarantining her away from the general laboring population contained its spread.35 The goal of allowing pregnant and sick workers to remain home or in hospitals was nonetheless the same. Planters tried to alleviate conditions thought to undermine demographic stability while maintaining plantation productivity.
Collins’s advice to exempt pregnant women from all “kinds of labours which require extraordinary exertions” (emphasis added) had the makings of a truer pronatal reform. In his writings, he stressed that during the early stages of pregnancy women could continue working as before. They should be exempted from tasks likely to cause “external injuries,” “blows, or strains, or sudden falls to the ground,” because they could cause women to miscarry.36 These were very idealistic reforms because they required planters to track and reassign pregnant women. Few planters were willing to make such assessments. Instead, most parturient workers received concessions according to the particular labor demands of planting and harvesting. The January-to-June harvest season was the most intense labor period on the sugar plantations. For the first six months of the year, the strongest men and women harvested ripened canes by hand using curved knives (bills), tied them in bundles, and packed them on mule-drawn carts that hauled them to the mills. A second group of workers followed the cane carts from the fields to the factories, where they unloaded and piled the cane into bundles next to the mills for grinding. Gradually, mill feeders extracted juice from canes by passing them back and forth through vertical or horizontal rollers, built from wood and cast iron and spun mostly by cattle, but sometimes by wind, water, and, even more rarely, by steam.37
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