Reviewed by Jennifer M. Spear | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3

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Reviewed by Jennifer M. Spear | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Jennifer M. Spear, University of California, Berkeley

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. By Jennifer L. Morgan. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 279 pages. $55.00 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
In Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, Kathleen M. Brown argued that racial differences were, at heart, based on English ideas about the proper gendered order of things.¹ Contributing to this ongoing discussion about race, gender, and sex, Jennifer L. Morgan centers not only on women's bodies but also on their actual labor, productive and reproductive, in her history of slavery in South Carolina and Barbados. Morgan argues that enslaved African and African American women's labor was physically and symbolically vital to the evolution of slavery in Britain's American colonies: their backbreaking labor in the fields underwrote the colonies' economic development and their reproductive labor defined, legally and culturally, the system of slavery. By focusing on the experiences of enslaved women, in addition to representations of them, Morgan forces scholars to move beyond the confines of cultural history that have limited many histories of racial formation.	1
Laboring Women begins by tracing the emergence of a racialized and sexualized ideology about African women, their bodies, and their reproductive capacities that served to justify the exploitation of their labor by English slave owners, an exploitation that required the construction of differences. Morgan convincingly demonstrates how English authors manipulated representations of African women to focus on nudity, shamelessness, sexual availability, childbirth, and breast-feeding. At the center of these misrepresentations, Morgan argues, was motherhood, particularly the myth of painless childbirth and a supposed ability to "suckle [their children] over their shoulder" (41). Though elongated breasts marked African women as "monstrous" (49), the lack of pain they experienced giving birth placed them outside "a Christian community" (40); both made them suitable for enslavement. Yet such representations were not without contradictions. Morgan notes that immunity to pain was also implicitly valued—it depicted African women as hardier than European women and therefore more suitable for fieldwork—and simultaneously acted as "a veiled critique of European female weakness" (17).	2
Since, as Morgan notes, the English were "late starters in the scramble for New World possessions" (1), these manipulated representations of African women were particularly powerful in shaping English ideas about race. Future colonists first encountered Africans in the comfort of their own "parlors and readings rooms on English soil" (49), long before they encountered actual African individuals; thus, their expectations of Africans were entrenched and perhaps less subject to change despite contrary and contradictory experiences. Texts depicting Africans have been scrutinized by previous scholars; Morgan's contribution is in contending that the disjuncture between English gender practices (from clothing to sexual mores to mothering) and African ones, rather than skin color or religion, was the central factor underwriting emerging racial distinctions.² These representations were not static but changed over time. As English involvement with the African slave trade expanded, their images of African women became primarily reduced to emphasizing their suitability for productive and reproductive labor. Morgan's analysis is limited to texts that were published in English; many, however, were originally written for French, Spanish, Dutch, and other European audiences. This publication of translations can shed light on the circulation of racial thought throughout Europe and let readers see how different European nations adapted ideas to their own particular colonial situations.	. . .

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