Labor, Health, and Medical Power in the Life of an Enslaved African-Born Muslim Woman in South Carolina

This paper examines the intersections of health, capital, gender, and power in the slaveholding South through the life of an African-born Muslim woman enslaved in South Carolina during the Revolutionary era to the eve of the Civil War. Drawing on military labor records, medical accounts, and local archives, it analyzes how enslaved women’s bodies functioned simultaneously as sites of economic extraction and medical scrutiny. Forced into military and infrastructural labor, this woman was later described in medical literature as physically exceptional and long-lived. Such representations reveal how slaveholding regimes interpreted Black women’s health as both economic asset and racialized spectacle. By centering one woman’s lifespan, the paper demonstrates how labor systems, medical discourse, and gendered control operated together to justify coerced labor and reinforce racial hierarchy in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South.