Enslaved Mothers Research Articles

Elizabeth Keckly and Ann Lowe: Recovering an African American Fashion Legacy That Clothed the American Elite

Elizabeth Keckly and Ann Lowe are not commonly recognized names in fashion history, though both were vital contributors to American fashion. Keckly, working in Civil-War-era Washington, DC, and Lowe, working in mid-twentieth-century New York City, were respected dressmakers to elite and stylish women, such as Mary Todd Lincoln and Jacqueline Kennedy. Keckly and Lowe were also unique as African American women, who learned their advanced dressmaking skills from their enslaved mothers and grandmothers, and successfully transformed those skills into thriving, free businesses. This article examines the extant garments created by both women, analyzing their construction methods and design styles to establish their considerable talent as dressmakers and fashion designers. Keckly and Lowe each excelled at both intricate and high-quality clothing construction and distinctive and sophisticated clothing design. While Keckly's style was elegantly minimal, Lowe embraced embellishment and complex detail. Keckly and Lowe were highly valued by their clients and there is no doubt that both designers influenced American style, yet it is their affiliation with famous clients that has generally prompted interest in their material culture. This research hopes to establish both African American women as major American fashion figures in their own right.

Mothering the "Useless": Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery

Abstract For decades, scholars have studied virtually every aspect of day-to-day enslaved life in antebellum America, giving particular attention to the nuances and intricacies of slave family and community life. Yet few have considered the social relations of disabilities in these most intimate and closely guarded spaces or questioned, in particular, the challenges that women faced navigating the complex experience of enslaved motherhood when their children lived with disabilities. Since the United States’s economically driven regime of chattel slavery reduced human beings to property valued according to their ability to labor, slaveholders categorized those with disabilities as "useless" and sometimes even "chargeable" (negatively valued because the cost of their care was a financial liability). This pragmatic, calculated reasoning left disabled, enslaved children particularly vulnerable because slaveholders devalued them as property and potential future laborers, privileging mothers’ labor over their disabled children’s presumably irrelevant needs. But these beliefs also sometimes worked to enslaved mothers’ advantage since disabled children were less likely to be bought or sold away. Even then, however, women still confronted a myriad of challenges in meeting their children’s daily needs and facing other unusual, often emotionally charged situations. For instance, owners sometimes sent their children elsewhere for surgeries to "correct" their disabilities, while others simply refused to invest in their medical needs. Disability also intersected with enslaved motherhood when women experienced disabilities, which sometimes helped them avoid separation from their children, though often as a result of extremely disturbing circumstances. Finally, because mothers were forced to rely on others for childcare while they worked, bondspeople with disabilities oftentimes took on this important task and social role. The presence of disabilities among enslaved people, then, shaped many aspects of mothers’ and children’s relationships to one another in ways that were both positive and negative. Grappling with the complex realities of enslaved motherhood through the lens of disability reveals that women rejected slaveholders’ definitions of their children; they adapted, resisted, and persevered to ensure that they mothered their "useless" children to the best of their ability, despite living under an institution that inherently devalued them.

"Coloured Citizens of the World": The Networks of Empire Loyalism in Emancipation-Era Jamaica and the Rise of the Transnational Black Press

Founded just two years after the Freedom’s Journal (1827–29) inaugurated the first African American newspaper in the United States, Jamaica’s first black and antislavery newspaper, the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press (1829–36), steadfastly publicized the planter-dominated colonial government’s refusal to implement the civil rights that the British Crown had extended to the island’s free black and slave populations prior to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. 1 Despite publishing in the face of the colonial government’s repeated attempts to force its suppression, the newspaper achieved a scope of influence that was well attested by a variety of nineteenth-century observers: British abolitionists credited it with providing the accurate reportage they needed to pressure their government to enact more quickly full slave emancipation in the West Indies, while colonial officials denounced the newspaper’s editor as a princi pal instigator of the massive slave rebellion that broke out in Jamaica in the early 1830s. 2 Yet the important contributions made by this and other ground-breaking Caribbean periodicals have since largely disappeared from the narrative of the emergence of black periodicals and print culture in the nineteenth century. One reason for this may lie in the differences between the Afro-Caribbean experience of print and the much better-known tradition of black writing in North America. Indeed, the historical legacies of both slavery and race diverged considerably between the early Caribbean and the United States; it is at best problematic to talk about “black” phenomena in the West Indies in a manner analogous to the North American context. 3 In the West Indies, the emergence of a non-white press was coterminous with the rise of the free people of color as a vocal cleavage in the island’s political public sphere. As the mixed-race descendants of traditionally white European fathers and free or enslaved African or Afro-Creole mothers, the colored or “brown” community inhabited a fraught middle area in the West Indian system of racial domination—a social pyramid constituted by a white planter minority at its apex and a base of

Debating Womanhood, Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in 1880s Rio de Janeiro

This article demonstrates how both the agency of women of colour and a particular set of ideas about femininity and maternity played an important part in shaping the ending of slavery in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It does so through the prism of untapped municipal documentation, exploring initiatives taken by the city council both to abolish slavery by emancipating mainly women and to shape the city's first generation of fully free working families by founding schools and charitable institutions. In enacting these measures, councillors found themselves debating not only the meanings of freedom, but the meanings of ex‐slave womanhood. Their discussions reflected both the long‐term development of ‘free womb logic’ in Brazilian slavery and emancipation, and tendencies by the 1880s abolitionist movement to make emotive, ‘feminised’ appeals for elite women to sympathise with enslaved mothers. The article explores how women of colour used elite discourses about freedom, maternity and womanhood in order to achieve freedom, but also contested and reshaped them as they sought to bring their own lived meanings to freedom.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores how the American decision to enslave Africans was a failure in love affecting the love relationships between enslaved mothers and children, mates, and members of the free black community. Through focus on maternal infanticide, the novel makes conscious the slave mothers’ plight: since they could not offer their children lives in freedom, they experienced motherlove as “as a killer.” The concepts of cultural phantom, cultural shadow, and cultural complex help identify what in Beloved is being drawn from collective unconsciousness for purposes of collective healing. The following analysis distinguishes personal complexes, such as the protagonist’s negative mother complex, from cultural complexes, such as the guilt issuing from the structural impossibility of protecting ones children from slavery. Morrison’s giving conscious representation to the psychological legacy of slavery opens a possibility of increased psychological freedom for the African-American community. Further, because Beloved offers to American collective consciousness the understanding that enslaving people is a failure in love, it provides an opportunity for all Americans to help heal the American dream, making it more whole by enabling the rights to life, liberty, and equal justice for all through incorporating the ideal of love of one another.

Birthing a slave: motherhood and medicine in the antebellum South

The deprivations and cruelty of slavery have overshadowed our understanding of the institution's most human dimension: birth. We often don't realise that after the United States stopped importing slaves in 1808, births were more important than ever; slavery and the southern way of life could continue only through babies born in bondage. In the antebellum South, slaveholders' interest in slave women was matched by physicians struggling to assert their own professional authority over childbirth, and the two began to work together to increase the number of infants born in the slave quarter. In unprecedented ways, doctors tried to manage the health of enslaved women from puberty through the reproductive years, attempting to foster pregnancy, cure infertility, and resolve gynaecological problems, including cancer. Black women, however, proved an unruly force, distrustful of both the slaveholders and their doctors. With their own healing traditions, emphasising the power of roots and herbs and the critical roles of family and community, enslaved women struggled to take charge of their own health in a system that did not respect their social circumstances, customs, or values. Birthing a Slave depicts the competing approaches to reproductive health that evolved on plantations, as both black women and white men sought to enhance the health of enslaved mothers - in very different ways and for entirely different reasons. Birthing a Slave is the first book to focus exclusively on the health care of enslaved women, and it argues convincingly for the critical role of reproductive medicine in the slave system of antebellum America.

Women's Voices, Black and White

twentieth century have revised and fiction to render enslaved mothers genderless. In fact, implication is that formerly enslaved women can regender themselves only in a space of physical freedom. The fictionalized slave narratives of Beaulieu's study are result of feminist and civil rights revolutions that lead to a revision of our under standing of women and black family relations and of the role that gender plays in narrativizing history (4). Furthermore, these neo slave narratives allow contemporary readers, especially black women, to unburden themselves of their collective guilt about slavery by finding in black women writers and in their heroines a means of celebrating both race and gender. Beaulieu discusses Margaret Walker's Jubilee (1966) as a transitional work and then develops her thesis principally by exam ining Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose (1986), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), J. California Cooper's Family (1991), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979). These texts are not so much slave narratives as they are 'freedom narratives: stories that celebrate freedom