eBook

Contested Bodies

Turner, Sasha

2017

Overview

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica,Contested Bodiesreveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources-including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence-Contested Bodiesyields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc,University of Pennsylvania Press
• Subject: 18th 19th century African American black history gender studies / 18th century / 19th century / anthropology / Antislavery movements / Antislavery movements -- Jamaica -- History -- 18th century / Antislavery movements -- Jamaica -- History -- 19th century / Atlantic / British Empire / Caribbean & West Indies / carribbean west indies / Child slaves / Child slaves -- Jamaica -- Social conditions -- 18th century / Child slaves -- Jamaica -- Social conditions -- 19th century / colonialism / doctors / gynecology / HISTORY / HISTORY / World / history medicine / History-United States / Jamaica / labor / midwifery / Motherhood / Motherhood -- Jamaica -- History -- 18th century / Motherhood -- Jamaica -- History -- 19th century / neonatal motherhood childbirth reproductive / Pregnancy / Pregnancy -- Jamaica -- History -- 18th century / Pregnancy -- Jamaica -- History -- 19th century / racism / reproduction / Slavery / Slavery -- Jamaica -- Social conditions -- 18th century / Slavery -- Jamaica -- Social conditions -- 19th century / Social conditions
• ISBN: 0812249186, 9780812249187, 9780812294057, 081229405X, 9780812224603, 0812224604