Jennifer Morgan Laboring Women

At times the assertions in Jennifer L. Morgan’s Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery can seem unexpectedly straightforward, for example when she merely states that, “African women were there” (197). At other points, the connections she proposes between race, gender, the body, colonialism, and ideology are almost overwhelmingly entangled and complex. But it is perhaps this mix of the explicit and the theoretical that make the book such an insightful and transformative work in the field of early Atlantic history. For while her topic is focused, the depth of her questioning, the scope of her research, and the attention she pays to the theoretical framework within that topic are profound.

Morgan’s overall goal for the book

The book draws on a variety of scholarship across numerous fields, including African American history, women’s history, colonial American history, feminist theory, and cultural studies. As a professor of both Social and Cultural Analysis as well as History, with research interests in the history of the Black Atlantic World, comparative slavery, and gender and sexuality studies, Morgan is clearly quite adept at working with the intersection of such ideas. She also articulates the necessity of employing such a range of fields to fill the surprising gaps and omissions in the current

Chapter 3 focuses on how slave owners appropriated their slaves’ reproductive lives to increase their own wealth. With high mortality percentages and low birthrates among slave societies, women with proven childbearing capacity were seen as pragmatically and symbolically valuable. The fourth chapters looks at how this commodification of African women’s wombs and offspring affected them and the community, redefining motherhood, childhood, and other family dynamics. This chapter challenges the ahistorical assumption that all reproductive experiences are primarily shaped by basic commonalities, and instead suggests, “the many ways in which childbirth itself is situational and demands historicity” (10). Similarly, chapter 5 seeks to explain that while reproduction was an essential component of enslaved women’s symbolic and pragmatic work, it should not overshadow the often-backbreaking labor they were forced to undertake in the field. Unlike, male slaves, women were rarely given the opportunity for advancement via skilled labor. Their daily lives were largely shaped by the harsh realities of agricultural production. The final chapter turns more explicitly to ideas of autonomy and reproduction, examining what Morgan refers to as a “gynecological revolt.” She looks at how women could use reproduction, or a lack