Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery is an examination of the construction of gender and race and the ideas of black women’s production and reproduction in West Africa, Barbados, and colonial America. Similar to historians before her, Morgan places gender at the center of her study in order to underscore the importance of black women’s productive and reproductive roles in New Word slavery. She argues that the duality of these roles contributed to black women’s experiences in slavery vastly different than black men. She states, “[g]ender functioned as a set of power relationships through which early slave owning settlers and those they enslaved defined, understood, and adjusted the confines of racial