Contested Bodies

Contested Bodies
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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.

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Sasha Turner. Contested Bodies

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Contested Bodies

Series editors Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown, Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

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The links abolitionists made between emancipation and reproduction not only stimulated changes in how enslaved women and children experienced labor and discipline and gave rise to conflicts over how to care for the bodies of women and children. They also generated documentation that provides insight into enslaved people’s birth and maternal practices that previously had been absent from official records. Responding to abolitionists’ efforts to capture the inhumanity of slavery, the British Parliament created several investigative committees between 1789 and 1792. These committees were tasked with assessing the conditions of the laboring populations of Britain’s West Indian colonies.21 Witnesses were called from various branches of the slaving system and included slave traders, doctors, and planters. While such proslavery witnesses pathologized slaves and exaggerated their own benevolence, their disparagement of what they perceived as the unhygienic, medically unsound, and unsafe birth and child-rearing practices of the enslaved gives us unprecedented insight into enslaved people’s intimate relations, birth, and child-care rituals.

Witness accounts, however, must be read with great care and in the context of other sources, such as medical records and doctor correspondence. The number of those accounts grew because slaveholder interest in procreation, coupled with the rise of academic medicine, increased the presence of professional doctors in the colonies. Although medical practitioners sometimes aligned themselves with planters, they were also interested in professionalizing medicine in the colonies and published manuals and accounts of their observations and treatments. Physicians who discussed the changing health and treatment of the enslaved offer additional insights into pronatal interventions and help to counterbalance some of the self-serving reports given by parliamentary witnesses.

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