Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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From Wilberforce’s account, the humiliation she endured was greater than the physical inflictions she sustained. From “the shame she suffered, she fell into convulsions, and died within three days.”3
In addition to the inhumanity demonstrated by Captain Kimber and his crew, Wilberforce found this case compelling because of the gender and age of the victim. His emphasis on her efforts to conceal her naked body, and that she died from shame rather than from her physical injuries, were keystones in his argument. He used such details to argue that African females embodied feminine virtues, which he and other late eighteenth-century British reformers promoted as necessary for the unfree inhabitants of the West Indian colonies to possess in order to transition from slavery to freedom. The reproductive bodies of female slaves were the vessels through which abolitionists articulated the pathway to freedom. Modesty and shame became the recurring descriptors that newspaper writers used to describe the unnamed victim. The Evening Mail speculated, for example, that she tried covering a body that was maturing from girlhood to womanhood. The newspaper intimated that she was at the beginning of her menstrual cycle, when it described her as suffering from a condition “incident to women about that age.” Additionally, in an abolitionist cartoon painted by Isaac Cruikshank, the artist extended the portrayal of the girl as a virgin. The running title of his painting, reproduced in Figure 1, described her as being ill treated for her “virjen [sic] modesty.” In both pro- and anti-Kimber accounts of the trial, witnesses, including Thomas Dowling, the surgeon of the ship who brought the case to Wilberforce’s attention, testified that she suffered from gonorrhea.4 Wilberforce did not disclose what affliction plagued the girl. Exposing a gonorrhea diagnosis could betray his efforts to call attention to slavery’s assault on black women’s virtue and purity. Abolitionists like Wilberforce wanted to prove how slavery assaulted the body and undermined the morals of captive women, with the result that they became barriers to the natural reproduction of West Indian slaves.
The victim’s age and sexual innocence were therefore of strategic interest to Wilberforce and fellow campaigners, whose proposals for abolition focused on the reproductive potential of captive women as a means through which colonial improvement and eventual freedom could be secured. Descriptions, such as those published by the General Evening Post that focused on her “innocent simplicity,” aimed to do more than elicit sympathy from Parliament or the masses. They were a central pillar in the arguments forwarded by British reformers on how to end slavery. Petitioners who spoke in the parliamentary debates that continued on 23 April 1792 centered their appeals on strategies for abolition. Henry Dundas, secretary of the Committee to Consider Measures for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, stressed the need for gradual, not immediate emancipation. In consideration of the potential financial ruin to West Indian merchants and planters due to the loss of labor, Dundas and other members of his committee argued that time should be given to raise self-reproducing laboring populations to carry on the work of the sugar plantations. This plan could succeed only if Parliament allowed the trade to continue for a predetermined period, while stipulating and regulating the age and gender of captive Africans. Importing young females within their childbearing years would generate self-sustaining populations, and over time, it would render the slave trade unnecessary. Dundas’s proposal to extend what he described as a vicious, inhumane system of trade contradicted the humanitarian grounds of abolitionism. Yet Dundas had the support of several members of the committee, including William Wilberforce, who in his writings and speeches offered a similar plan to manage the reproductive lives of captive women as a route to freedom.5
Figure 1. Isaac Cruickshank, The Abolition of the Slave Trade; Or, The Inhumanity of dealers in human flesh exemplified in Captn. Kimber’s treatment of a Young Negro girl of 15 for her Virjen Modesty (London, 1792). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs.
The paradox of abolitionists’ quest to save the hapless victims of the slave trade but not without ensuring that the sugar plantations maintained their productivity is one of the enigmas Contested Bodies examines. Using the body as its conceptual frame, this book explores how abolitionists perceived and represented young, black female bodies, and in particular, how they legitimized and sought to extend colonial rule and the benefits it generated to the mother country by controlling these women’s reproductive lives. By insisting that the imperial government and West Indian planters reform the working and material conditions of female slaves to enable them to reproduce the laboring populations, abolitionists tied abolition to women’s reproductive ability. Boosting slave population growth would not only end colonial dependence on an immoral and inhuman trade. More important, it would also produce children whose undeveloped minds and bodies could be fashioned into subjects that embodied the industriousness needed for the continued success of the colonial economies. In other words, these reforms would make slavery obsolete but improve the moral fiber of the colonies without jeopardizing British colonial goals or the fortunes of its investors. Stimulating population growth was therefore not just about ending slavery; when viewed in the context of British colonialism it was also about cultivating moral and industrious subjects. In following this strategy, abolitionists linked abolition and colonial reform to the reproductive lives of enslaved women.
Examining how Europeans used African-descended women to secure their interests is not new to studies of sugar and slavery in the colonial Caribbean. Beginning in the 1970s with the pioneering work of Lucille Mathurin Mair and continuing throughout the 1980s and 1990s historians debated the roles and responsibilities of women during Caribbean slavery. These historians have taught us much about the importance of sexual difference in determining the divergent demands and experiences of labor, punishment, resistance, sexual relations, family life, rewards, and privileges during slavery. In this body of work, gendered experiences were rooted in a person’s anatomical sex, but were distinguished further by color, race, and class.6
Although these approaches have revealed much about the divergent experiences of enslavement, the category woman as an analytical framework has not allowed for sufficient consideration of how the perceived abilities and prescribed treatment of the body determined how enslaved subjects were discoursed upon, labored, and disciplined and how they resisted. Thinking of enslaved people as having bodies that could be adorned, experience pain and pleasure, reproduce, and express desire, for example, allows us to access alternative experiences of slavery, even among members of the same sex. Dressing the body, styling the hair, and dancing communicated gender difference that complicated sexual difference.7 Examining slavery through reproductive bodies reveals not only how the lives of women differed from men’s. We also learn about the divergent experiences among women. Most obviously, conceiving and bearing children placed demands on and allowed childbearing women to care for their bodies in ways that infertile women could not. The reproductive body was essential to differences in intimate experiences among enslaved women.
In investigating abolitionist insistence that sugar planters promote and manage biological reproduction among their slaves, this book places the body at the center of its analysis. Using the body as the main investigative frame requires probing the representations and competing meanings given to the body and its capacities, the social relations and cultural ideals and expressions people created around the body, and how the body’s abilities and disabilities disrupt assumptions and restructure lives and beliefs. A body-centered approach explores prescriptions made about the body and its functions, its uses, treatment, and care and who benefits from its abilities. It requires recognition that the material body exists as an entity susceptible to illness, infertility, and death, despite human intervention and independent of meanings given to it. A body-centered approach is also concerned with understanding how ideas about the body determined people’s lived experiences.8
More concretely, Contested Bodies examines how abolitionist activists portrayed the bodies of enslaved women and children, and how such representations gave meanings to the body, and created a blueprint for what constituted proper treatment for young black women. As conduits for abolition, reform, and black citizenship, the laboring and reproductive bodies of enslaved women and their offspring were vulnerable to new labor and punishment regimes as well as care and medical interventions.