Women of the far right: the mothers' movement and World War II

Abstract

narratives of particular slaves and from plantation records she concludes that transfer of young women from the house the field occurred in order encourage slave marriage and childbearing (187). Slaves and the condition of slavery are also made accessible through photographs and illustrations and endnotes serve as supplement and reference. The bookdoes not, however, have a bibliography and the index is spotty; FrederickDouglass, for example, appears in the text but not in the index. The strength of Born in Bondage lies in Schwartz's articulation of slavery from the contrasting perspective of the slaves and their owners. For example she juxtaposes the slave community's view of a baby as the continuation of a people (47) and the slaveowner's view of the as commodity. Schwartz delineates the difficulties encountered by slave families who struggled forge and maintain family relationships in the face of owners who discounted the desire of slaves for separate housing for their families and appropriated the slave mother's time for their own use because they recognized no need for slaves maintain a separate family identity (74). The problems of maintaining subjectivity in the face of slavery form an undercurrent throughout the text, and Schwartz carefully articulates the especial problems of raising children be aware of themselves as individuals under the restrains of slavery. She makes clear the value of community and family in raising children know what it meant be a slave, but also what it meant to be a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, a parent or a child (211).