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The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South
Beginning on the shores of West Africa in the sixteenth century and ending in the U.S. Lower South on the eve of the Civil War, Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh traces a bold history of the interior lives of bondwomen as they carved out an existence for themselves and their families amid the horrors of American slavery. With particular attention to maternity, sex, and other gendered aspects of women's lives, she documents how bondwomen crafted female-centered cultures that shaped the religious consciousness and practices of entire enslaved communities. Indeed, gender as well as race co-constituted the Black religious subject, she argues--requiring a shift away from understandings of "slave religion" as a gender-amorphous category.
Women responded on many levels--ethically, ritually, and communally--to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.
Women responded on many levels--ethically, ritually, and communally--to southern slavery. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how they remembered, reconfigured, and innovated beliefs and practices circulating between Africa and the Americas. In this way, she redresses the exclusion of enslaved women from the American religious narrative. Challenging conventional institutional histories, this book opens a rare window onto the spiritual strivings of one of the most remarkable and elusive groups in the American experience.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published September 14, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 8, 2023
This is a super fascinating look at African American women’s roles within religion in enslaved communities, with a particular focus on how religious expression was racialized and gendered in these communities. There is extremely interesting work on religion on the African West Coast, the resignifying of the womb, re/membrance and dismemberment as a psychological and social experience, and the ways spirituality and religion intersect with these concepts. It’s solid stuff, but I would perhaps say that I would like MORE connecting tissue with men and children’s understanding of and experience with these women-led religious expressions. It’s THERE, but I just want MORE. Otherwise, it’s a very good history of religion in enslaved communities with a specific focus on women’s roles in that context.
October 26, 2022
Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2021.)
The Souls of Womenfolk is a chronological and thematic cultural history of enslaved African women of the sixteenth century, from the West African slave trade to the lower South of the United States before the Civil War. Her work is an expansion of previous historians like Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery while also an original interpretation relying on primary oral histories, specifically the WPA slave narratives from Georgia. Wells-Oghoghomeh argues that “women’s experiences of enslavement engendered distinctive female embodied, female imaged, and female practiced religious formations and orientations in the anglophone Lower South.”[1] Her argument goes further to claim that these female cultural practices were central to the developing religion of the enslaved people of the Lower South.
She first outlines the West African slave trade and the collective memory embedded in enslaved women. Enslaved women were favored over men, unlike the transatlantic slave trade; the survival techniques learned by West African enslaved women by using sexual favor were attempted in the lower South to no avail. Wells-Oghoghomeh introduces the reader to her imaginative use of the English grammar and language idiosyncrasies of meaning as she explains that “re/membrance as the definition for “religion” in a concept that the cultural practices of bondspeople were innovative remembering of West African ritual and cosmological heritage.” [2]
Wells-Oghoghomeh’s s monograph flows from themes of rape by enslaver to childbirth while adopting updated terms in the English language, like her term, womb ethics, as an attempt to illustrate enslaved women’s limited agency. Some enslaved women practiced infanticide and herbal abortion remedies to prevent a hopeless and violent life for their children. She argues that the religious practices of birth, maternity, and the memory of West African childbirth religious rituals were incorporated by the enslaved women of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. In Wells-Oghoghomeh’s retelling, she relies heavily on earlier ethnohistory of West African practices to review how maternal practices would have been for enslaved women in the Lower South. Over time, the commodification of the female reproductive system occurs as re/production grows the enslaved population. She illustrates the complexity of psychological changes to identity with motherhood set amidst the backdrop of hopelessness as an enslaved woman.
At the latter half of her book, the religion of Christianity is reviewed while illustrating the considerable differences between Black religious identity and white slaveholders. Wells-Oghoghomeh outlines how slaveholders used Christianity as a weapon. “Slaveholders’ not so subtle attempts to marry the violent disciplinary structures of the caste system to the brand of Christianity doled out to enslaved participants on a weekly basis..”[3] It is important to note throughout her work that the definition of religion is not the institution of Christianity but rather the central practices of culture and the spirituality of enslaved women in their day-to-day life for survival, their children’s lives, and their community. As enslaved people understood Christianity, “For a people constantly faced with dismembering experiences, power was a commodity, and Christianity was one of the avenues to power available to the enslaved, …especially for women.”[4] Her use of the slave narratives juxtaposed with a review of cultural practices from West Africa works in her retelling of how enslaved women survived a system of violence amid the Christian hypocrisy of the white slaveholder.
Wells-Oghoghomeh’s best work is on the spiritual and cultural rituals of midwifery and funeral practices which showed how powerful the religious cosmology of enslaved women became part of the enslaved male and child religious identity. Her work on childbirth, maternity, postpartum morbidity, and female identity within the physicality of biology illustrated her deftness at redefining the religious nature of these spaces. Wells-Oghoghomeh updated terms and innovative grammar to signify these religious changes like “re/membrance,” and re/production, distracted from her powerful argument. Wells-Oghoghomeh does excel in her definition of religion with a powerful interpretation of oral historical sources as she recenters black women as the drivers of the new cultural identity for the entire enslaved community of the Lower South.
[1] Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved
Women in the Lower South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2021. Kindle Edition.) 4.
[2] Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk. 6.
[3]Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved
Women in the Lower South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2021. Kindle Edition.) 203.
[4] Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved
Women in the Lower South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2021. Kindle Edition.)
The Souls of Womenfolk is a chronological and thematic cultural history of enslaved African women of the sixteenth century, from the West African slave trade to the lower South of the United States before the Civil War. Her work is an expansion of previous historians like Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery while also an original interpretation relying on primary oral histories, specifically the WPA slave narratives from Georgia. Wells-Oghoghomeh argues that “women’s experiences of enslavement engendered distinctive female embodied, female imaged, and female practiced religious formations and orientations in the anglophone Lower South.”[1] Her argument goes further to claim that these female cultural practices were central to the developing religion of the enslaved people of the Lower South.
She first outlines the West African slave trade and the collective memory embedded in enslaved women. Enslaved women were favored over men, unlike the transatlantic slave trade; the survival techniques learned by West African enslaved women by using sexual favor were attempted in the lower South to no avail. Wells-Oghoghomeh introduces the reader to her imaginative use of the English grammar and language idiosyncrasies of meaning as she explains that “re/membrance as the definition for “religion” in a concept that the cultural practices of bondspeople were innovative remembering of West African ritual and cosmological heritage.” [2]
Wells-Oghoghomeh’s s monograph flows from themes of rape by enslaver to childbirth while adopting updated terms in the English language, like her term, womb ethics, as an attempt to illustrate enslaved women’s limited agency. Some enslaved women practiced infanticide and herbal abortion remedies to prevent a hopeless and violent life for their children. She argues that the religious practices of birth, maternity, and the memory of West African childbirth religious rituals were incorporated by the enslaved women of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth. In Wells-Oghoghomeh’s retelling, she relies heavily on earlier ethnohistory of West African practices to review how maternal practices would have been for enslaved women in the Lower South. Over time, the commodification of the female reproductive system occurs as re/production grows the enslaved population. She illustrates the complexity of psychological changes to identity with motherhood set amidst the backdrop of hopelessness as an enslaved woman.
At the latter half of her book, the religion of Christianity is reviewed while illustrating the considerable differences between Black religious identity and white slaveholders. Wells-Oghoghomeh outlines how slaveholders used Christianity as a weapon. “Slaveholders’ not so subtle attempts to marry the violent disciplinary structures of the caste system to the brand of Christianity doled out to enslaved participants on a weekly basis..”[3] It is important to note throughout her work that the definition of religion is not the institution of Christianity but rather the central practices of culture and the spirituality of enslaved women in their day-to-day life for survival, their children’s lives, and their community. As enslaved people understood Christianity, “For a people constantly faced with dismembering experiences, power was a commodity, and Christianity was one of the avenues to power available to the enslaved, …especially for women.”[4] Her use of the slave narratives juxtaposed with a review of cultural practices from West Africa works in her retelling of how enslaved women survived a system of violence amid the Christian hypocrisy of the white slaveholder.
Wells-Oghoghomeh’s best work is on the spiritual and cultural rituals of midwifery and funeral practices which showed how powerful the religious cosmology of enslaved women became part of the enslaved male and child religious identity. Her work on childbirth, maternity, postpartum morbidity, and female identity within the physicality of biology illustrated her deftness at redefining the religious nature of these spaces. Wells-Oghoghomeh updated terms and innovative grammar to signify these religious changes like “re/membrance,” and re/production, distracted from her powerful argument. Wells-Oghoghomeh does excel in her definition of religion with a powerful interpretation of oral historical sources as she recenters black women as the drivers of the new cultural identity for the entire enslaved community of the Lower South.
[1] Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved
Women in the Lower South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2021. Kindle Edition.) 4.
[2] Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk. 6.
[3]Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved
Women in the Lower South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2021. Kindle Edition.) 203.
[4] Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved
Women in the Lower South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2021. Kindle Edition.)
April 17, 2023
Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh provides an excellent examination into the interiority of African bondswomen in the American south. Her work seeks to fill a vast void in African American feminist scholarship, and helps to bring a voice to the most silent and most marginalized group in Historical research. Finding myself extremely frustrated with the lack of academic sources on bondswomen religious interiority that wasn’t overwhelmingly Christian based, this book was a much welcomed breath of fresh air! I applaud Wells-Oghoghomeh for this valuable contribution to a much need aspect of Black feminist history and I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of American Slavery or the lives of Black American female slaves.
December 7, 2021
I really went into this book with hope, but I left disappointed. I think that Wells-Oghoghomeh makes some pretty large leaps with her West African understand of memory in regards to the WPA interviews. I also think that she undersells the role of Christianity in her scholarship. I do appreciate her gendered examination of religion. I would recommend other literature related to the religious lives of enslaved Africans and African-Americans in the colonial and antebellum periods.
December 11, 2022
overall, really challenging and interesting analysis on slave religion from the perspective of women slaves. it’ll be interesting to continue watching the reception of this book and how it calls into question the centrality of christianity for slave communities in the deep south as well as some of the moral and ethical questions wells-oghoghameh brings into the foreground for slave women. a heartbreaking read nonetheless.
April 25, 2023
amazing writing but a very hard and emotional read. I really enjoyed how she centered women in the study of religion giving more insight into Southern religion than other books I've read
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews