‘Her Work of Love’: Forced Separations, Maternal Grief, and Enslaved Mothers’ Emotional Practices in the Antebellum US South

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article considers enslaved mothers’ emotional responses to the separation of their children. While slavery studies scholars have discussed the individual impact sales had on enslaved people, and historians of emotion have explored white communities’ understandings of both white maternal love and enslaved emotion, few studies have explored how events such as sale shaped enslaved women's own emotional understandings, practices, experiences and expressions. Guided by enslaved women's own testimony, this article argues that enslaved women created their own, gendered, emotional worlds in response to their experiences of sale – their own conceptions of love and grief, ways of expressing their emotion, and collective emotional practices in the aftermath of separation. Not only individual responses to emotional pain, their collective emotional practices must also be viewed as acts of refusal to submit to slave trading practices, white emotional standards and racialized emotional ideologies. Through loving and grieving actively, enslaved women maintained their maternal bonds in the face of both practical and ideological attempts to decimate them.