Swing Sickle for Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia. By Daina Ramey Berry. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 224. Cloth, $40.00.)Reviewed by Katherine PaughIn her new study of gender and slavery in antebellum Georgia, Daina Berry explores a number of topics: agricultural and nonagricultural labor, enslaved family and community, and role of enslaved laborers in informal economy. Focusing on upcountry Wilkes County and lowcountry Glynn County, Berry makes creative use of a variety of sources, including plantation records, African American folk songs, slave narratives, and personal papers of elite whites in order to present an overview of significance of gender in shaping experiences of enslaved laborers.Berry argues effectively that enslaved women's agricultural labor required a high level of that was recognized and valued by both slave owners and plantation managers. Many previous scholars have found that enslaved women were generally barred from work in crafts of any kind-as carpenters, blacksmiths, and so on-and Berry does not question this finding. By refining our understanding of what constitutes skilled labor and including new categories under that rubric, however, Berry is able to battle assertion that enslaved women were generally employed in unskilled labor. The use of mechanical cotton gins, for example, was a skilled task performed primarily by a small group of women on St. Simons Island plantation of Kelvin Grove. Berry argues that the importance of these women to Kelvin Grove's productivity shatters assumptions about gender, labor, and skill (21). By considering level of required for many non-agricultural (35) types of labor assigned to enslaved women, Berry further bolsters her argument, concluding that tasks like sewing, nursing, and cooking also demanded high levels of skill. Moreover, enslaved women who engaged in such tasks were frequently allowed to travel outside boundaries of plantation, bringing into question assumption that because women were rarely employed in crafts or maritime industry, they had less geographic mobility than their male counterparts.Berry's study might have benefited from greater attention to recent work on gender division of labor in rice agriculture. Judith Carney's Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in Amemcas (Cambridge, MA, 2001) demonstrates that many African women brought skills in rice processing with them on their voyages across Atlantic, but Berry makes little use of Carney's insights and never explores how African agricultural practices may have shaped gender division of labor on Georgian rice plantations. This omission points to a broader problem with Berry's study: Though she packs her book with interesting anecdotes about experiences of African Americans in antebellum Georgia, she never considers how surviving African cultural practices shaped these experiences. This problem is exacerbated by her reliance on Works Progress Administration slave narratives, which were collected during 1930s from formerly enslaved men and women who were necessarily separated by a great temporal gulf from transAtlantic journeys of their African ancestors.In her discussion of enslaved family and community, Berry explores rituals that enslaved laborers employed to cement bonds of kinship and community. She describes how enslaved were able to bind themselves together through courtship and marriage rituals, religious activities, dances, and what she calls working socials (3)-gatherings that combined tasks like quilting and roof mending with social interaction. Berry's discussion adds to our understanding of enslaved culture, but it is hampered throughout by an overly homogenous view of enslaved community. She describes, for example, how African American folk songs illustrate drive to incorporate new church members with Christian fold during this period, emphasizing that worship meetings provided opportunities to bind together enslaved communities. …