“To Be Sold, for No Fault, but on Account of Her Breeding Fast …”: Enslaved Women, Childbearing, and Symbolic Disablement in Early New England

A social and intellectual history of slavery and disability in early America, this paper seeks to critically reexamine the relationship between gender, childbearing, motherhood, and ideas about disability in eighteenth-century New England. Throughout the eighteenth century, the bodies and reproductive lives of enslaved women represented a contested terrain of power in New England. Unlike their pronatalist peers in the plantation south or Afro-Caribbean, this paper argues that many New England enslavers harbored antinatalist views in the era preceding gradual emancipation (pre-1784), and moreover, that white enslavers viewed the complex embodiment of pregnancy as a temporary disability or impairment due to the perceived loss of a pregnant or postpartum mother’s labor. As this paper shows, in the small-scale slaveholding society of New England, the loss of an enslaved mother’s labor or a diversion of her attention away from the care work of raising their enslavers’ children were not welcome developments. Viewing enslaved infants and children as “useless,” many New England slaveholders gave them away. Enslaved mothers, on the other hand, embraced motherhood and actively resisted these intrusions in their intimate lives by giving birth to multiple children, or in some instances, running away to avoid separation from their beloved children. Engaging a wide range of sources including bills of sale, diaries, and runaway and slave for sale advertisements, this paper foregrounds how enslaved mothers negotiated the limitations placed upon their reproductive lives and more broadly the metaphoric linkages between slavery, race, gender, disability, and motherhood in pre-Industrial America.