Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies

This chapter in the 1996 edited volume More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas explores women, childbirth and resistance in British Caribbean slave societies. It examines aspects of production and reproduction - the "dual burden" of slave women of hard labor in the plantation economy combined with childbearing and household production in the slave community. The chapter argues that tensions inherent in this dual burden, combined with attempts by slave masters to manipulate slave cultural practices and fertility, strongly influenced slave women's responses to childbirth and infant rearing at both conscious and unconscious level, which need to be analyzed as part of the slave resistance.