Mothering and Labour in the Slaveholding Households of the Antebellum American South

Abstract

This article examines the organisation of mothering and slave-labour in the slaveholding households of the antebellum American south, focusing upon enslaved women’s domestic labours, enslaved wet-nursing, and the roles of female slaveholders in the care of enslaved children. Utilising sources ranging from female slaveholders’ correspondence to the Federal Writers’ Project interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans in the 1930s, it seeks to locate white women within the systemic dual exploitation of enslaved women as productive and reproductive labours, whilst attending to the particularities of household-centred forms of labour and slaveholder intervention. Investigating the complex dynamics of mothering and labour in slaveholding households furthers our understanding of white women’s roles as ‘co-masters’ and ‘central partners in slavery’s maintenance and management’ [Glymph, 2008] whilst foregrounding the distinctive ways in which they shaped enslaved African American women’s lives. Females slaveholders’ interests and interventions were shaped and sometimes driven by their desires, experiences, and roles as mothers; and within the intimate worlds of slaveholding households, white and Black mothers’ privileges and disadvantages were directly connected. This article uses these forms of labour, and particular forms of slaveholder intervention, to illuminate the variabilities and complexities in enslaved women’s everyday experiences of mothering their children, which encompassed nurturing white children, relinquishing care-giving to slaveholders, intimate and confining forms of slave-labour, and multitudinous forms of mother-child separation.