Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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powers, and the visions of freedom and bodily autonomy enslaved people held.
For William Wilberforce, forging family ties and building communities would best harness the reproductive capabilities of enslaved women. In his pronatal plan, he first encouraged enslaved women and men to marry and settle into independent cottages. He disagreed with other pronatal plans, like those offered by James Ramsay, that stressed giving material incentives to mothers for bringing their pregnancies to term and for rearing children. Nature alone, Wilberforce declared, “would take care of this for them.” It is not by material rewards that women nurture their children, but rather by assurances of the well-being of their families. Furthermore, Wilberforce wrote, “maternal tenderness, domestic sympathy, and paternal interest” will grow and blossom once masters guaranteed slaves a domestic sanctuary. Conception and full-term pregnancies would occur abundantly once enslaved women had a “home” where children were “safely born with a tolerable prospect of happiness.” Wilberforce therefore implored masters to “let mothers be allowed immunities and indulgencies, especially a little time from field work, morning and evening, to attend to their infants.” Such indulgence, he asserted, would encourage “domestic affections [to] spring up and flourish” in women.24
Even as Wilberforce’s plan offered greater opportunities for safeguarding family bonds, enslaved families’ comfort and gratification were not the primary aims of enhancing family security. Instead, it offered a less coercive way of keeping colonial economies intact as they gradually transited from slavery to freedom. Wilberforce was not opposed to the economic benefits of colonialism. He hoped to find a way in which investors’ economic ambitions could coexist with the moral imperatives of reformers. In his widely circulated 1807 Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade Wilberforce advocated the formation of families among the enslaved as a means of assuring masters that if they treated slaves humanely by allowing them family and community security, the enslaved would return loyalty and duty to them. Having experienced the value and rewards of “good character,” enslaved mothers, he posited, would strive to maintain it, out of fear of reaping the displeasure of their masters and losing family privileges. In the final push for abolition in 1807, Wilberforce’s Letter emphasized master paternalism as indispensable to the future success of the colonies. His definition of success included the amelioration of enslaved women’s conditions, the security of their families, and masters’ realizing that coercion and physical abuse were not necessary to regenerate laborers or maintain labor output. If masters implemented such reforms, he proclaimed, “the slaves will daily grow happier [and] the planters [grow] richer.”25 Despite the fact that Wilberforce gave due consideration to how pronatalism could affect the productivity of the plantations, tensions between the slaving interests and abolitionists persisted because of the attack on slavery and the slave trade. In the minds of slaveholders, the African trade was the lifeblood of colonial economy and they could not envision plantation cultivation without it or the coercive powers slavery gave them.
Like Wilberforce, Ramsay articulated a plan for abolition and reform through women’s reproductive ability, but his was radically different and more elaborate. Ramsay encouraged slaveholders to follow the example of the few progressive plantations where owners and managers paid attention to the nutritional and medical needs of their laborers and regulated women’s workloads. Every plantation should have a hospital for enslaved patients, decked with at least two chambers dedicated solely to mothers and children. One chamber, he explained, would serve as a delivery room and the other as a nursery for suckling children. Mothers would leave their infants in the nurseries and for the first six months would work “near the hospital, to be at hand to suckle their children, from time to time.” During this six-month period, Ramsay suggested, masters should refrain from giving new mothers strenuous tasks, assigning them instead to “moderate labour.” Mother-workers should resume the “ordinary work of the plantation” only when they had regained their strength and had weaned their infants. Upon returning to work, “two elderly hand women” would attend their children. Ramsay also suggested that plantation owners and their managers assign nurses to wash and feed infants while their mothers worked. To incentivize mothers further, masters should indulge them with “extraordinary allowance of food both in quality and quantity” and at the time of “presenting” their weaned children to the overseer reward them with a “complete suit of clothes.” Overall, as motivation to birth a greater number of children, all mothers bearing more than three children should receive full exemption from field work. Ramsay concluded that if plantation owners and managers implemented these reforms, birthrates among the enslaved would steadily increase.26
Ramsay’s experience as vicar, doctor, and slaveholder in the West Indies gave him firsthand knowledge of the challenges of maternal and infant health. The material and medical reforms he proposed were therefore sorely needed. They promised to improve the survival chances of enslaved mothers and babies, as well as help women balance labor demands with caring for their children.27 Imposed hospital accommodations for expectant and new mothers shifted the responsibilities of maternity and neonatal care away from enslaved people’s communities and placed them into the clutches of masters. Instead of advocating public health facilities, operated by state authority and therefore less subject to the arbitrary power of individual slaveholders, Ramsay advocated building private hospitals, owned, funded, and managed by the slaving interests.28
Moreover, in promoting the removal of children from their mothers’ care and enforcing a shortened lactation period of six months, Ramsay’s pronatal plan disrupted mother-child relations and customary maternal practices that had developed in Jamaica. Commonly, enslaved women nursed for eighteen to twenty-four months, but fought to continue nursing for up to thirty-six months.29 Ramsay’s six months weaning timetable reduced what enslaved mothers already thought was a short time to nurse their babies. His proposal neglected to consider the value of child-rearing practices already in place in Jamaica. The conflicts that would evolve on the ground between planters, doctors, and enslaved women throughout the 1780s to 1830s would be over such limits reform-minded planters tried to impose on how long enslaved women nursed their children.
Ramsay’s proposal seems even more arbitrary when one considers emergent ideas in late eighteenth-century Britain that encouraged breastfeeding for at least twelve months. British medical opinion had begun to shift away from supporting wet nursing and toward encouraging mothers nursing their own children because doctors deemed it better for infant growth and development.30 Reformers also advocated lactation because, in the words of one medical writer, it stimulated “maternal affection” and it gave the child “a greater sense of security and confidence about the world and increases its attachment to its mother.” The burgeoning British obstetrics community not only urged mothers to nurse their children but also sanctioned their doing so for at least the full first year of their babies’ lives. Ramsay’s proposal for enslaved mothers was half the time advised for British women.31 Briefer lactation periods expedited enslaved women’s return to the sugarcane fields. In this regard, Ramsay’s pronatal plan not only offered masters a way to balance their productive goals with reproductive ones, it also reaffirmed the authority masters claimed over slave women’s bodies and maternal customs. Under the plan, male abolitionists and planters would determine the length of breastfeeding, not the mothers themselves. Such affirmation of mastery conflicted with the autonomy women carved out for themselves in the preabolitionist years when masters neglected childbirth and childrearing.
But beyond creating a way for enslavers to balance the dual labor demands they placed on enslaved women, there was another, more fundamental effect of Ramsay’s not simply borrowing lactation recommendations for British mothers and applying them to enslaved mothers. His policies inscribed differences between black and white women. The reproductive ability of both sets of women were appropriated in service of the British nation, which needed people to work, sail ships, and defend the empire. English women were not just reproducers, they also were mothers, whose civic duty it was to bear children and raise them to become good, loyal citizens. Conversely, enslaved women were vessels that bore future workers, viewed with only a dim possibility of sharing the same political rights and privileges as whites. As adults corrupted by slavery, captive Africans were not fit to prepare their children for freedom. Ramsay therefore advocated two sets of reforms. One focused on improving the material conditions of