| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. By Jennifer L. Morgan. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xvi, 279 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8122-3778-1. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8122-1873-6.)
"African women were there," Jennifer L. Morgan observes in her study of slavery and gender in the English colonies of the West Indies and the North American mainland (p. 197). They were of practical value, laboring in large numbers not only to cultivate crops but also to perpetuate the slave population that brought prosperity to British America. Planters used "outrageous images and callously indifferent" methods to exploit the ability of these women to bear children (p. 7). "I do not intend to argue that the experience of enslaved women should be approached only through their biological capacity to reproduce," Morgan writes in justification of her emphasis on this aspect of slave women's lives (p. 11), but their expectations and experiences surrounding childbirth shaped both their lives and the institution of slavery as much as did the cultivation of particular crops.	1
The task Morgan sets for herself—proving that the presence of black women mattered—is made difficult by an absence of their voices in the documentary record. She must rely on sources created by white men: travel accounts, ship records, and official government documents (especially probate records and court cases), which she mines meticulously for nuggets of information. Morgan is to be commended for her imaginative use of sources.	. . .

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