"If I Am Free My Child Belongs to Me": Black Motherhood and Mothering in the Era of Emancipation

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Files

WicksAllen_umd_0117E_22784.pdf (3.57 MB)
(RESTRICTED ACCESS)
No. of downloads:

Publication or External Link

Date

2022

Citation

Abstract

Black women’s reproduction was foundational to Atlantic slave societies because it produced future laborers and profits for slaveholders. Although the commodification of bondwomen’s children generated grief, loss, and violence, enslaved women constructed individual and collective practices of motherhood that challenged that commodification. As emancipation reconfigured the social order, black women’s and children’s bodies and labor acquired dramatically new meanings. From the standpoint of former slaveholders, black women’s reproductive capacity and offspring were no longer assets but encumbrances. Meanwhile, emancipation meant that freedwomen could exercise parental rights that had previously been denied. These shifts raise questions about how motherhood and childrearing informed black women’s transition from slavery to freedom in the U.S. South. The dissertation argues that black women’s identities as mothers profoundly affected how they experienced and negotiated freedom. Black mothers sought to exercise self-determination by defining motherhood on their own terms, gaining control over their reproduction, and rearing their children as they saw fit. To achieve these ends, they demanded remunerative employment, custody of their children, protection from violence, child support, education for their progeny, and personal dignity. Reconstituting family and protecting the welfare of their children animated formerly enslaved women’s pursuit and definition of freedom. Whereas formerly enslaved women’s reproductive capacity and children had been assets under slavery, in freedom they became undesirable to employers, generating a whole new set of constraints for black mothers, who, as a result, faced employment discrimination and poverty. In response to these circumstances, newly freed mothers developed a politics of mutual vulnerability that stressed collectivity rather than individualism. If motherhood engendered vulnerability, the embrace of relationality served as a source of black maternal empowerment. While building on previous scholarship that has examined emancipation through the lens of gender, the dissertation deploys a more specific social location—motherhood—to bring black women’s politics into sharper focus, emphasizing the ways in which ex-slave women made and remade freedom through kinship and care work. In so doing, it also reveals that motherhood remained a site of black subjugation, albeit in new ways.

Notes

Rights