representations and competing meanings given to the body and its capacities, the social relations and cultural ideals and expressions people created around the body, and how the body’s abilities and disabilities disrupt assumptions and restructure lives and beliefs. A body-centered approach explores prescriptions made about the body and its functions, its uses, treatment, and care and who benefits from its abilities. It requires recognition that the material body exists as an entity susceptible to illness, infertility, and death, despite human intervention and independent of meanings given to it. A body-centered approach is also concerned with understanding how ideas about the body determined people’s lived experiences.8
More concretely, Contested Bodies examines how abolitionist activists portrayed the bodies of enslaved women and children, and how such representations gave meanings to the body, and created a blueprint for what constituted proper treatment for young black women. As conduits for abolition, reform, and black citizenship, the laboring and reproductive bodies of enslaved women and their offspring were vulnerable to new labor and punishment regimes as well as care and medical interventions. In the abolitionist era, fertility and age, in addition to sex, determined the treatment and uses of bodies. On Jamaican sugar plantations where planters implemented “reproductive interventions” or ways of manipulating women’s fertility, the lives of mothers and their children were transformed.9 Transformations in the intimate and working lives of the enslaved, particularly women and children, constitute a second key theme that runs through this book. These transformations were punctuated, however, by conflicts between abolitionists, on one hand, who claimed authority to define the treatment of female slaves and prescribe the uses of their procreative abilities, and slave owners, on the other, whose ownership of slaves invested them with rights to wield power over women’s bodies.10
Abolitionists were only one group among many who were interested in the bodies of enslaved women and their children. Others included the imperial government, the local government in Jamaica, planters, doctors, and enslaved people themselves. A third task of this book, then, is to investigate how abolitionist representations and prescriptions for the reproductive enslaved body conflicted with those of other parties who owned female slaves and were financially invested in fertility and child-rearing practices. Contestations over the portrayals of enslaved women’s bodies, as the book’s title suggests, emerged between Jamaican slaveholders and abolitionists. Abolitionists had humanitarian and colonial concerns, while planters were interested in continued returns on their investments.
Representations of the capabilities of black and female bodies further diverged from what estate managers did on a daily basis to manage young enslaved women. Slaveholders depicted female slaves as robust and fertile, and argued that population decline resulted from women’s promiscuity and imbalanced sex ratios instead of overwork and brutal punishment. While these depictions were obstacles to reforming the medical care extended to women and how they were disciplined, masters at times tailored the management of their female workers around the physical manifestations and medical complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Planters revisited their labor practices and methods of disciplining workers because of abolitionist pressure and imperial mandates; but they implemented reforms according to the needs and interests of their property.11 The division of labor observed on the plantations was not simply one between males and females, or between African born, Creoles, and coloreds. Rather, workers toiled according to bodily assessments, including reproductive ability and disability as well as physical development, size, shape, and weight.
A conceptual approach that focuses on the body is useful in challenging generalizations about the sexual division of labor because it requires us to examine the organization of enslaved people’s lives and labor according to specific bodily functions and the meanings given to them. Examining the womb as vital to the wealth and power of Jamaican slaveholders and future productivity of the sugar estates extends the conversations beyond sexual difference. Viewed from this perspective, the assumption that during the abolitionist era, circa 1780–1834, that women were no more sheltered from hard labor or cruel punishment than their predecessors were, is not self-evident. Rather, field and factory workers labored according to the subjective assessments planters made of female body mass and stages of pregnancy, as well as the physical and mental maturity of young people. Studying slavery through differently abled bodies counters previous conclusions that, with the exception of skilled and elite workers, such as drivers and housekeepers, labor roles were “gender blind.”12 Concerns for biological reproduction during the abolitionist era transformed both planter assessments and women’s experiences of plantation work.
In using a body approach, this book builds on the work of historians Deborah Gray White, Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Jennifer Morgan, Stephanie Camp, and Deirdre Cooper Owens that explores female biological life cycles as well as the construction and use of the female body as a source and site of pleasure, medical experimentation, and disease during slavery.13 Showing how women’s childbearing ability was essential for creating gendered racial differences under slavery, Morgan’s work has been especially generative of the questions at the center of this study. How and with what outcome did abolitionists use the reproductive and maturing body to construct and legitimize a gradual path to ending slavery? How were these bodies used to determine the position and future of the enslaved within the colonies and the British Empire? How did the links abolitionists made between the reproductive body, abolition, reform, and citizenship shape the intimate and working lives of enslaved women and children as well as their parental, family, and community relationships?
In answering these questions, this study draws upon theories and perspectives from anthropology, material feminism, and gender studies.14 Studies on the reproductive lives of women and concomitant medical interventions and political and labor imperatives of modern Europe help to frame efforts to regulate and control black women’s childbearing ability and practices as part of a widespread conflict between doctors and midwives and childbearing women and workplace managers throughout the Atlantic world. From London and Paris to New York and Boston man midwives gradually displaced women attendants in the birth chambers of the city-dwelling elites. Driven partly by Enlightenment science, the advent of man midwives as the scientific authority over childbirth entangled reproductive concerns with articulations of national identities, gender order, and empire building. Eighteenth-century shifts away from viewing bodily difference between male and female as one of degree rather than absolutes required new theories. Male scientific authority over reproduction cleared a path for defining those differences and articulating them in ways befitting political and cultural needs. The ability of British men of science to explain the mysteries of the female body and reproduction reinforced gender hierarchies of male superiority that had hitherto exerted physical and moral power over women through virginity requirements, whipping for fornication, and limited legal protection for rape and domestic violence. Control over reproduction was another frontier in the quest for male domination over women’s bodies. Unlocking the secrets of women’s bodies also imbued national rhetoric of British progress, pointing out that scientific advances distinguished the practices of modern Britons from crude and superstitious practices of a bygone era and other cultures. Applying these frames to the colonial and slavery context affirms how reproduction was enmeshed in working out power and identity but also raises questions about how reproduction was complicated by the moral imperatives of abolitionism, the proprietary claims of slave ownership, and the resistance of the enslaved.
A closer look at benevolent reforms in other colonial settings also teaches us that, despite the criticisms and dissent of reformers, their medical interventions in the treatment of epidemic diseases like leprosy and cholera, for example, were not divorced from colonialism’s preoccupation with bringing subjugated populations culturally in line with the metropole, or refashioning them into workers and bureaucrats suited to fulfill the economic and political goals of the colonies. The colonial state intervened in the representation, regulation, and care of bodies it considered vital for the economic prosperity, political power, and ideological legitimation of colonialism. When applied to British slave colonies like Jamaica, abolitionist representation of enslaved women as degenerative people whose sexual perversions and gender aberrations, imputed by slavery, disqualified African captives from immediate
