| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Jennifer L. Morgan. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. (Early American Studies.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. Pp. 279. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.95.

This rich and detailed monograph explores women's lives "across time and space" to interrogate "ways in which ideologies of race and gender contributed to a set of common experiences for enslaved women" (p. 2). In centering the lives of slave women in the colonial period, Jennifer L. Morgan aims not simply to make a case for inclusion but to establish "a foundational methodology" in writing early American history that demonstrates the impact of women on the development of slavery (p. 4). She claims that her book is "highly original" in providing a "theoretically grounded view of reproduction and labor as the twin pillars of female exploitation" in slavery and demonstrating how "women's burden was distinct from that of men" (p. 1). This is a rather ambitious assertion, given that existing studies by Barbara Bush, Hilary McD. Beckles, Marietta Morrissey, Bernard Moitt, and Deborah Gray White have already established these central factors in women's lives in the Anglophone, Francophone, and North American slave worlds. The archival research on which the book is based is commendable, but a struggle to establish a unique angle on the development of gendered slave identities is evident in Morgan's rather convoluted introduction.

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