The Working Mom

Mothers have been working since the beginning of time, under a vast array of circumstance. Economic stability is often the factor that decides a woman's labor autonomy; large portions of the population could not be stay at home mothers even if they chose to do so. However, the most drastic form of laboring mothers comes in the form of slave women—those who were denied rights to their bodies, their labor, and their children. Enslaved women lacked any sort of autonomy in both their labor and their motherhood.

Initially, the fertility of female slaves was completely overlooked. Their masters were completely unconcerned with their bodies’ conditions because with the influx of slaves from the Middle Passage, each worker was replaceable. Slave women also expressed slim to no desire to having children, given that they would either be equally as oppressed or sold away to unknown circumstances. Planters saw pregnancy and young children as hindrances in female slaves’ productivity, so they felt no incentive to improve conditions to foster motherhood. In fact, the staggeringly low reproductivity of slaves was noticed by abolitionists and used as a tactic to highlight the brutalities of slave life. The disparity between the number of children belonging to slave women versus European women was so high that abolitionists could use it to demonstrate that slave conditions were too poor to sustain human life. While the abolition of slavery itself was decades away, abolitionists began working on stopping the trade itself, and one of their largest bargaining chips were slave mothers. While the intentions were good on the part of abolitionists, the fertility of slave women was quickly monetized and exploited. Because slave owners viewed offspring as a natural extension of their ownership, reproductive labor quickly became folded into the expectations of slave women. Intimacies like breastfeeding became regulated by masters, and their investment in slave reproductivity stripped women in any ounce of autonomy they may have had while their masters were uninterested. Motherhood as labor breeds a specific form of exploitation that infringes on all aspects of personhood—physical, mental, and emotional—particularly when pregnancy was forced through non consensual intercourse. The autonomy that women seek in the workplace was completely absent from slave motherhood, and their narratives are integral in understanding maternal freedom by understanding its opposite.

David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Joseph Allred Papers

Letter from Vilet Lester 

This correspondence is between Vilet Lester, a slave who at the time of the letter resides in North Carolina, and Miss Patsy Patterson, Vilet’s former master. From the opening of the letter, the dynamic of subordination is clear—it starts with “My Loving Miss Patsy”. The first half of the letter reads like two high school friends keeping in contact, with Vilet gushing over Miss Patsy and inquiring of the gossip on the plantation. At the end of the letter, Vilet inquires about the whereabouts of her daughter. It becomes clear that in her sale, she was separated from her child and now does not even know where in the country her daughter is. Vilet Lester has crafted a letter in which she is trying her hardest to gain the bare minimum of knowledge about her own daughter: her location. And in order to do so, she has fawn over the woman who used to own her and played a role, albeit passive, in Vilet’s separation from her daughter. This one letter, a snapshot of one mother’s experience, is so indicative of the lack of control that slaves had in their own lives, over their own families. Contemporary mothers are often fighting for the right to be present in their children’s lives despite their work schedules. Vilet Lester, like so many other enslaved mothers, was stripped of her child entirely as a result of her working condition. It is crucial to compare the importance our society places on the quality of motherhood today with its refusal to let black women act fully as mothers in the past.

Dr. J.H. Fairfax Certificate

An integral aspect of working motherhood to note is that women worked alongside men in addition to their delegated homemaking duties. Although they were expected to produce more slaves for the plantation, slave women were seen primarily as laborers. As such, they were expected to do the same amount of work as their male counterparts, sometimes regardless of their maternal status. The Lisa Unger Baskin collection features an unassuming piece of paper that displays this graphically. In this document, Dr. J.H. Fairfax examines a woman named Alsy, a laborer who is suffering from a procidentia uteri—her entire uterus is outside of her body. Rather than offer a mode of treatment to better her health, Fairfax is concerned about her working condition. He suggests that she “may be made useful by the application of an instrument”, insinuating that if he can fit her with a device to keep the womb in place, she will be able to work once again. Alsy’s wellbeing is completely undiscussed. The disregard for pregnant bodies has continued through time, pregnant women continue to fight for accommodations at work to protect their health. Evidence of this treatment also reminds one of the lack of control women have over their own bodies in the workplace during and surrounding pregnancy, apart from their constraints in parenting once a child is born. Such a struggle is portrayed in the consistent struggle to control reproduction in order to facilitate their full participation in life outside of motherhood. However, in this instance, a woman is deprived of any choice whatsoever. The brutality of this situation cannot be overstated.

Organizing from Outside: The Role of Female Abolitionists