Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica

Early American Studies

by Sasha Turner

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 Bodies reveals 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 Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Grad School, Race

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"therefore centers pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing practices as zones of conflict, in which abolitionists, slaveholders, doctors, the imperial and Jamaican governments, and enslaved people competed to control and regulate biological reproduction and determine who benefited from its rewards."

Turner explores how abolitionists perceived and represented young black female bodies and how they legitimized and sought to extend colonial rule and the benefits it generated to the metropole by controlling women's reproductive lives. Turner's theory is the physical body can be used to examine many aspects of nature, society, etc.

I loved that she uses the body as a conceptual frame for the thesis. A body approach does 4 things.
1. The Body approach allows representations and competing meanings given to the body and its capacities, social relations, cultural ideals and expressions, body's abilities and disabilities.
2. The body approach explores prescriptions made about the body and its functions, treatment, care etc. Recognizes that the material body is an entity susceptible to illness, infertility and death.
3. The body approach is concerned with understanding ideas about how the body determines people's lived experiences.
4. The body is useful in challenging generalizations about the sexual division of labour > and requires scholars to examine the organization of lives and labour according to bodily functions and meanings given to them.

Originally I thought this was going to be more of a 'bottom-up" book. It is not. BUT it is still a fantastic book. Turner looks at the actions of both the enslaved and the slaveholder/abolitionist/colonial official. The focus on abolitionists made me re-think the classic narrative that abolitionists wanted slavery gone for moral reasons ((which was not always (probably not even the majority of the reason) true). Turner examines the abolitionist paradox of saving hapless victims of the slave trade while ensuring the sugar plantations had their productivity.

The study is also concerned with how enslaved people contested medical, gendered, and parental ideals foisted upon them. By controlling childbearing practices enslaved women had brief access to power that temporarily dominated gender order. Turner illustrates how central pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing were to the abolition of slavery, reorganizing plantation work, discipline and care of slaves, and fashioning of resistance, social life, and culture among the enslaved. I think THAT was the most fascinating aspect of it all for me. How the abolition of slavery caused a shift in regards to reproduction. It went from importing workers to needing to cultivate new workers to wanting to create good little citizens. Planters reformed plantation life according to the capital's needs and White power. Chef's kiss to Turner's work!!

[Jim Gulley · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the mid-1700s, a growing number of British politicians and religious leaders began agitating for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. They were unable to gain the necessary political support based on their moral arguments because of the power of the sugar interest and slaveocracy. The abolitionists changed strategy by first targeting the slave trade before moving against slavery itself. In Contested Bodies, Sasha Turner argued that the abolitionists leveraged the reproductive potential of enslaved women to build a strategy around a self-reproducing workforce rather than the importation of enslaved workers from Africa. Once the slave trade was ended, the transition from slavery to free labor would be enabled by new generations of Creoles raised in nuclear Christian family units that prepared them to be productive British subjects.

In the first half of the book, Turner presents the details of the abolitionists’ strategy, problem-solving the barriers to reproduction in the enslaved population, and the dilemma of lost productivity during an enslaved woman’s pregnancy and post-natal period.

In the second half of the book, Turner took a deep dive into the history of labor and delivery, postnatal care of infants, enslaved motherhood, and enslaved childhood. She explored the paradox of how planters, abolitionists, enslaved people, and caregivers were all united in an effort to improve prenatal and postnatal healthcare. While each constituency had common interests in a self-reproducing and growing population of blacks in Jamaica, their methods and motivations were divergent and created conflicts and tensions. Particularly poignant was Turner’s assertion that infanticide was a likely cause of infant mortality as enslaved mothers were despondent in their hopelessness and that planters used nurseries to remove children from this perceived threat.

[Erin]

s'24 - 201E - final project

personal fave

[Mike Emett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Required reading for a graduate seminar, Comparative Slavery