Читать книгу Contested Bodies - Sasha Turner - Страница 12

Chapter 3

When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment

My master flew into a terrible passion, and notwithstanding her pregnancy, ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked and to be tied up to a tree in a yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and cowskin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested, and then he beat her again and again.…The consequence was that poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child.

A few days later, Hetty died of her injuries.¹

Abolitionists used stories like Hetty’s to garner support for colonial reform and eventual emancipation. Hetty’s experience illustrated why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce. Planters were unusually cruel in their treatment of enslaved women. According to abolitionists like James Ramsay, who previously resided in the colonies, masters commonly stripped women of their clothes, exposing their naked bodies as they whipped them. They endangered women’s lives and denied them modesty and decency. The special circumstances of pregnancy, abolitionists argued, did not mitigate planter cruelty. As Hetty’s case vividly demonstrated, expectant mothers were vulnerable to their masters’ caprice, cutting short their own and their babies’ lives.

In addition to emphasizing the cruel treatment of women and expectant mothers, abolitionists also singled out strenuous labor regimes as an important factor that negatively affected women’s ability to reproduce. Women worked undifferentiated from men in some of the most physically demanding tasks in the field. The few women who conceived received no relaxation of their work responsibilities. An even smaller number of women had successful pregnancies. Many women suffered miscarriages or prematurely delivered stillborn babies because of the physically taxing labor they performed. The harshness of labor and punishment, abolitionists concluded, made it difficult for the plantations to sustain their slave populations by births. Reforming these areas was vital to stimulate population growth, wean planter dependence on the slave trade, and prepare the colonies for a transition from slavery to freedom.

Local conditions determined the colonial twofold response to abolitionists’ quest to affect reproduction among enslaved women. First, the local government passed a series of legislation to alleviate the aspects of slavery it thought impeded the growth of slave population. Between the 1780s and 1820s, the Jamaican Assembly passed laws based on its own initiatives as well as in accordance with mandates from the Crown. During the 1820s in particular, and with much wrangling and many amendments, colonial assemblies adopted general ameliorative laws insisted on by the imperial Parliament. Second, estate owners and managers enforced abolitionist reforms and colonial laws according to the needs of their properties. The details of amelioration, worked out in the colonies, reflected planter concerns for profit and maintaining productivity, putting them in conflict with metropolitan and local government reformers. Although planters dominated the Jamaican Assembly, its members were among the most elite and idealistic whose visions for the colony as a whole were sometimes out of step with individual planter goals. Legal reforms promised to alleviate some of the worst aspects of slavery that undermined slave population growth. But their immediate and full-scale adoption could cause the collapse of the sugar plantations and undermine the power of slaveholders. In their daily running of the sugar estates, plantation agents managed such risks.

Pronatal policy changes and risk management resulted in multilayered conflicts. One struggle occurred among abolitionists, Parliament, and the local government, over who should control policy relating to women’s reproductive labor. A second struggle took place among abolitionists, who proposed a series of pronatal reforms; the local government, which passed pronatal legislation; and slaveholders, who interpreted and enforced policies according to the need to maintain plantation productivity and protect their power. Attorneys who managed estates conflicted with their England-based employers who insisted on reforms that were more in line with abstract abolitionist proposals than a true understanding of the everyday labor and production needs of their estates.

These contests to control female slaves’ reproductive labor led to the simultaneous contraction and expansion of enslaved people’s liberties. Would-be mothers came more directly under the scrutiny of planters and doctors who tried to regulate labor and punishment according to their views about what best protected fertility. New laws empowered enslaved people to take their masters to courts, while the promised mitigation of punishment and relaxation of work regimes entitled women to claim protection from some of the worst elements of slavery. The claims enslaved men and women made on the liberties pronatalism afforded them extended their ongoing conflicts with their enslavers. A third set of struggles, therefore, occurred between plantation agents and enslaved people, who had conflicting views about appropriate responsibilities and discipline for women during pregnancy. These struggles reflect not just the ways in which pronatal abolitionism transformed enslaved women’s lives; they also reveal the centrality of women’s reproductive labor to the moral and economic ambitions of abolitionists and slaveholders, and reproductive concerns as essential to enslaved people’s resistance.

Pregnancy and Labor

Planters knew that field labor negatively affected childbearing but assumed that other tasks not related to sugarcane planting or sugar manufacturing would be more conducive to promoting healthy pregnancies. Planter Edward Long asserted, “Domestic Negroes have more children in proportion to those on the pens; and the latter than those who are employed on the sugar plantation. I will not deny,” Long declared, “Negroes breed the best, whose labour is least or easiest.”² It is unclear whether the “pen” Long wrote about was a “livestock pen” operated as an independent unit or a “satellite pen” attached to sugar plantations. Although sugar dominated Jamaica’s economy from the late seventeenth century on, many investors capitalized on the need for independent industries, such as livestock farming and manure production. Their chief consumers were sugar planters, who relied on cattle for manure, haulage, transportation, and food. By the mid-eighteenth century, sugar planters who had been experimenting with new ways of increasing the efficiency and profitability of their estates invested in producing their own cattle on remote or unproductive parts of their properties. On sugar plantations like Golden Grove, Phillipsfield, and Pleasant Hill that evolved into “dual pen/sugar plantation” units, pens became a convalescent work site for seasoning new workers, recuperating sick workers, and retiring old workers, because planters insisted that pen-related work was lighter. In addition to cultivating pastures, digging watering holes, erecting fences, and collecting fodder, pen workers cultivated food crops like plantains and yams.³

Scholars comparing the labor routines of pens to plantations have argued that it was not “lighter” or “easier” work.⁴ Digging water holes and planting grass could be just as taxing on the body as digging cane holes and planting cane. The major difference between livestock pens and sugar plantations was that pens had no annual harvest that required workers to work around the clock.⁵ Planter perception that pen work was “easier” than tasks on the sugar estate, however, influenced how they managed female slaves they purchased for reproductive purposes. In 1789, attorney Simon Taylor promised to place the recently purchased young “wenches” at Bachelor’s Hall pen (attached to Golden Grove estate). There, he related, they “shall do no other work but to clean cocos [and] yams, which is the lightest work … and they shall not interfere with the estate’s work and [they] shall have every chance of breeding that is possible.”⁶

Assessing the estimation of Edward Long and Simon Taylor that women pen workers bore more children than sugar estate workers is more complicated than might be assumed. A demographic study using the register of returns of independent livestock pens reveals higher rates of natural increase, while an analysis of accounts of increase and decrease for dual pen-sugar plantation units suggests that workers on satellite pens had smaller families than women working on sugar estates.⁷ In comparison to women workers at John Tharp’s sugar estates (including Good Hope and Merrywood), fewer women at the pens (including Windsor, Chippenham Park, Covey, and Top Hill) bore the requisite six children to allow them full reprieve from plantation work in accordance with Jamaica’s ameliorative laws that exempted mothers with large families from field work.⁸ At Windsor pen in 1818, for example, only one woman, Keatty Ebo, took care of her children on a fulltime basis. We do not know, however, how many children Keatty Ebo mothered, as the records did not list them. Unlike estate inventories that more consistently listed women and the number of children they bore, bookkeepers at Windsor pen simply listed Keatty Ebo’s occupation as “minding her children.” The same is true for Top Hill pen, where only one woman, fifty-two-year-old Moll, birthed “many children.” No such mothers existed in the records for Chippenham Park pen, where Diana and Molly bore four children each, but continued working.⁹

Population size did not always correlate with the number of women with large families, and in some cases, women on sugar estates bore few children. Merrywood estate had 79 women workers, four of whom bore between six and seven children. Windsor pen had a similar number of female workers (76), but only one woman birthed six children. On large properties like Wales and Lansquenet estates, which had at least 127 and 149 females each, there is no record of women bearing six or more children between 1798 and 1818.

It is difficult to pinpoint specifically why women working at the sugar estates bore more children than those at the satellite pens. One reason could be the sheer volume of female workers on individual properties. Of Tharp’s seven estates and three pens in 1818, Covey estate had the largest female population, registering 158 women, 12 of whom bore at least seven children. Good Hope estate had the second largest female population (154) and only five women birthed six or more children. Of these seven estates, women working at five of them had large families. Among Tharp’s three pens, only one woman between1708 and 1818 had a family of more than six children. This mother resided at Windsor pen, which had the largest female population of all three pens. Of Windsor pen’s 76 females, only one woman had a large enough family to earn her exemption from hard labor. At Chippenham Park and Top Hill pens, which had the smallest female populations of 26 and 28 women, respectively, only two women at the former property bore four children.¹⁰

Myriad reasons exist for the variation in the number of children born on individual properties. Although planter correspondence stressed placing potential mothers at pens, estate inventories showed that workers moved back and forth between pens and estates. During the sugar harvest in particular, planters reassigned pen workers to the estate to meet the excessive work demands. Thus unlike enslaved people who toiled on independent livestock pens those belonging to dual pen-sugar plantation units were not necessarily spared the peak in labor demands during the harvest, since estate mangers rotated workers between estates and pens.¹¹ Age distribution, residential arrangements, and the ratio of Jamaican-born (Creole) to African-born workers also informed fertility differences on these properties. From 1824 to 1828, Old Montpelier estate and Shettlewood pen consistently had larger families than New Montpelier estate. The larger proportion of Creoles under age twenty-five at Old Montpelier and Shettlewood pen determined a more steady population growth than New Montpelier estate, which suffered rapid population decline due to its large aging African population.¹² Whereas abolitionists had simply emphasized increasing the population of women, the Jamaican Assembly and local planters insisted on importing captive women and girls below age twenty-five because they calculated that the plantations had an excess of workers beyond childbearing years.

Abolitionists’ use of slave population growth as an index of slavery reform inevitably led them into conflict with planters because slaveholders could not fully control women’s fertility. Diet, disease, place of birth (Africa versus Jamaica), and women’s attitudes toward childbearing combined with hard work and punishment to determine demographic stability.¹³ Placing women on pens did not guarantee higher conception and birthrates because this combination of factors determined population growth rather than just the demanding labor of the fields.

Ongoing labor shortages plagued Jamaican sugar estates because of high mortality and morbidity rates, delayed arrival of slave ships, and the lack of capital to purchase new workers. These shortages meant that sheltering parturient women from plantation work was not regularly practiced or sustainable.¹⁴ By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, enslaved women formed the bulk of field workers on the majority of Jamaican sugar estates. Reassigning them from the fields to the pens en masse would have crippled the economy and potentially forced the plantations to collapse. As described in the Introduction, field work relied on a gang system where laborers worked in three different gangs according to perceived strength and stamina. The first gang was made up of the strongest men and women because they performed the most demanding work, like felling trees to prepare the land for planting, digging cane holes, and cutting, bundling, and carrying canes. The second gang consisted of young people aged fourteen to sixteen and workers weakened by advancing age or illness. The third gang was composed of disabled workers and children from ages five to twelve. Of all three field gangs, the third gang had the least strenuous work, like weeding and picking up foliage from harvested cane. On a typical plantation, women made up the majority of first- and second-gang workers.

Women not only outnumbered male field workers, the majority of the total female population were field workers. For example, at Mesopotamia estate from 1762 to 1831, at least 84 percent of the total female population were field workers, compared to 55 percent of males.¹⁵ Enslaved women dominated field labor because there were fewer specialized roles reserved for them. With the exception of domestic and health-care positions, like housekeepers, cooks, and midwives, women performed few skilled jobs. Men worked in specialized and supervisory roles, including drivers, craft workers, and stock keepers. At Mounthindermost plantation in 1831, for example, men exclusively held at least seven occupational categories.¹⁶

Field workers were usually the healthiest, most able-bodied workers ranging from ages fourteen to fifty-one, with a mean age of thirty. This age range overlapped closely with the ages at which women became mothers. The recorded ages of mothers at Worthy Park estate for the years 1784 to 1838, for example, reveal that women birthed children between ages nine and fifty-one, and had the same mean age of thirty as women field workers. Ironically, then, youthfulness, health, and vitality that permitted planters to exploit women as field workers were the same factors that marked their most fertile years. It is therefore unsurprising that the bulk of women who bore children were field workers. At John Tharp’s estates, most, and on some occasions all, mothers worked in field gangs. In 1818, of Covey’s eighty-nine women, ten field hands and only one domestic were pregnant. Similarly, at Wales estate, with the exception of one woman, Molly, all five expectant mothers were field workers. The same is true of Pantre Pant estate, where 14 percent of childbearing women were field workers. Simultaneously reassigning all eight expectant mothers would have slowed the productivity of the plantations, and Pantre Pant estate would have lost eight women workers in addition to the thirty other women who were described as “invalid [and] incapable of working.”¹⁷

Records of other Jamaican estates, like those belonging to Nathaniel Phillips, similarly show that pregnant women were typically field gang workers. At Phillips’s Pleasant Hill estate in 1789, of the seventy-seven women, fifty worked in the fields, four of whom were pregnant. Likewise at Phillipsfield estate, of the sixty-nine women, fifty-five labored in the fields, of whom eight were pregnant, one about to give birth.¹⁸ Given that the plantations depended on women as field workers and that these were the women most likely to bear children, Jamaican planters had to develop practical working solutions that allowed them to exploit the reproductive ability of women while minimizing production loss. The tension between fertility and productivity meant that parturient workers received minimal care to protect their unborn children without it being too costly to the labor needs of an estate.¹⁹ Enslaved women’s importance to field work meant that slaveholders adopted abolitionist proposals to relax the labor routines of mother-workers according to predicted consequences for the productivity of their plantations.

Field workers were vitally important to the sugar plantations, a status well reflected by their fiscal value. At Good Hope estate in 1804, all nine childbearing women were field workers with values in excess of £100. Expectant mothers attracted a price of £115 to £180, with a mean of £140, which was on par with prices for nonpregnant women laborers (£50-£180 with the same mean of £140).²⁰ Most importantly, pregnant and nonpregnant female field workers had values that compared favorably with those of male field hands, which ranged from £50 to £220 and similarly had a mean value of £140. As was the case for other workers, chronic illness or disability rather than pregnancy reduced the fiscal worth of mother-workers.²¹ At best planters viewed childbearing as a temporary impediment, distinct from more permanent impairments and disabilities that classified laborers as “invalids,” “superannuated,” and “worthless.”²² Of the workers valued at Tharp’s estates in 1804, Mundingo Juliet’s condition of “breeding constantly” reduced her assessment from £170 to £115.²³ While women’s child-bearing potential did not necessarily inflate or impair their marketability, their values fell more quickly after birthing many children. Numerous pregnancies were thought to weaken women’s physical stamina and therefore reduce their anticipated productivity and value.²⁴

The importance of reproductively capable women to the sugar estates made it a huge financial liability to remove them from the fields as abolitionists proposed. Planters therefore put expectant mothers to work in less labor-intensive gangs, rather than grant them full exemption from the fields. Estates generally classified bonded workers in six major categories: drivers, domestics, craft workers, field workers, marginal workers, and non-workers, subdivided further according to particular skill or specific tasks. Craft workers included carpenters, masons, and smiths, while domestics were cooks, washers, and seamstresses.²⁵ With the exception of Green Park estate, which listed “pregnancy” and “lying-in” in the occupation categories of its roll call, most sugar estate inventories listed “pregnancy” as the “condition” of workers, in the same way that they recorded illnesses. At best, they considered pregnancy as a factor that impaired the laboring ability of women temporarily. On some properties, planters placed pregnant women in the same gangs as workers suffering from other illnesses.²⁶

One eyewitness, Maria Nugent, the Jamaican governor’s wife, claimed that while touring the island between 1802 and 1804, she saw “women with child work[ing] in the fields till the last six weeks” of their pregnancies (emphasis added).²⁷ Nugent gave her readers no indications of the types of work pregnant women performed in the fields. Planters sometimes reassigned parturient workers to a variety of field-related tasks based on perceived difficulty. The proprietor of Cornwall estate, Matthew Lewis, instructed his attorney to discharge Cubina’s pregnant wife “from all severe labour” (emphasis added).²⁸ Similarly, at Denbigh and Thomas River estates, the moment women were “under the suspicion of being with child” they were removed from the “harder labour of the field and put to light work” (emphasis added). They were reassigned to the “hoeing of fences” and “boiling of oils for the use on the estate.”²⁹ Given that women of childbearing age dominated field work, and were as highly valued as able-bodied men, estate owners and attorneys hesitated to grant mother-workers full labor release. Planters attempted to balance their reproductive goals with their ongoing labor needs and financial investments by placing would-be mothers in work roles presumed to be less strenuous. Reproduction as a value-added commodity singled out childbearing workers from the mass of enslaved women.

As plantation owners sought to capitalize on the productive and reproductive capacities of female slaves, enslaved women became more vulnerable to the scrutiny and control of medical practitioners. Plantation physicians attended the general needs of the sick, and to a limited degree, they supervised labor, pregnancy, and delivery. Between 1741 and 1745, Jamaica had just twenty-four doctors and surgeons, which increased to twenty-six between 1771 and 1775. By 1795 the number of doctors doubled to fifty-six and their presence in the island continued expanding throughout the 1800s. With important exceptions, doctors were planter allies in the struggles to harness the reproductive potential of female slaves.³⁰ Physicians like Benjamin Turney, who was contracted by Golden Grove estate, lived on the property and monitored the everyday health and labor of workers.

In addition to overseeing work performed by enslaved women and attending to medical emergencies, other doctors, like David Collins and William Sells, published general guidelines on how to regulate the labor demands on enslaved women to protect their pregnancies while capitalizing on their full labor potential.³¹ Sells believed that childbearing women could continue working in their customary roles until they were midway through their pregnancy. He wrote, “no alteration [is needed] in their usual labor until four or five months advanced.” After the fifth month, he recommended “a lighter employment … and continued until the lying in.” He did, however, advise planters to grant pregnant women time off from work during illness to give mothers and unborn children the best chance of recovery and survival.³² Sells’s advice published in 1817 might have been borrowed from observations of practices on properties like Lansquenet estate, where in 1804 Bess, a twenty-six-year-old mother-to-be, was allowed to remain home because of ill health.³³

There is nothing to suggest that Bess received time off due to pregnancy alone, however. Sick workers commonly received work exemption, particularly when they suffered from contagious illnesses like smallpox. Planters had firsthand knowledge that epidemics could destroy harvests and wipe out populations, both free and enslaved. When the Georgia estate suffered from an influenza outbreak, it lasted from the end of December 1809 to March 1810. The disease was so widespread that the mill ground to a halt, and despite medical aid, the property lost several workers who died shortly after contracting the illness.³⁴ It is quite possible that Bess, also identified as “diseased,” suffered from a highly communicable disease, and quarantining her away from the general laboring population contained its spread.³⁵ The goal of allowing pregnant and sick workers to remain home or in hospitals was nonetheless the same. Planters tried to alleviate conditions thought to undermine demographic stability while maintaining plantation productivity.

Collins’s advice to exempt pregnant women from all “kinds of labours which require extraordinary exertions” (emphasis added) had the makings of a truer pronatal reform. In his writings, he stressed that during the early stages of pregnancy women could continue working as before. They should be exempted from tasks likely to cause “external injuries,” “blows, or strains, or sudden falls to the ground,” because they could cause women to miscarry.³⁶ These were very idealistic reforms because they required planters to track and reassign pregnant women. Few planters were willing to make such assessments. Instead, most parturient workers received concessions according to the particular labor demands of planting and harvesting. The January-to-June harvest season was the most intense labor period on the sugar plantations. For the first six months of the year, the strongest men and women harvested ripened canes by hand using curved knives (bills), tied them in bundles, and packed them on mule-drawn carts that hauled them to the mills. A second group of workers followed the cane carts from the fields to the factories, where they unloaded and piled the cane into bundles next to the mills for grinding. Gradually, mill feeders extracted juice from canes by passing them back and forth through vertical or horizontal rollers, built from wood and cast iron and spun mostly by cattle, but sometimes by wind, water, and, even more rarely, by steam.³⁷