Fragmented Bodies: Women, Labour, and Slavery in Jamaica, 1788–1823

Enslaved women’s work assignments shifted according to slaveholders’ needs to increase the slave population, particularly in the years after the 1807 prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade that cut off British Caribbean planters’ supply from Africa.  Females worked not only in accordance with their perceived strength, they also laboured according to their masters’ assessment of their fecundity.  Women within childbearing years, as well as those who were visibly pregnant, received exemption from field labour and customary punishment in varying degrees.  This paper argues that despite slaveholders’ interest in fertility and maternity, women’s vulnerabilities to punishment and arduous labour persisted because planters were as interested in their unborn workers’ health and welfare as they were interested in mothers fulfilling their labouring responsibilities.  Where possible, planters separated the interest of unborn children from those of their mothers, and treated enslaved women according to plantation labour needs and their speculations on what best secured foetal well being.